Translated as “music” in Japanese, Ongaku served as a banner for the achievements of the legendary Group Ongaku—an artistic collective formed in 1958 that included figures such as Yasunao Tone and Takehisa Kosugi—in creating truly free and exploratory music on Japanese soil. Without delving into the free improvisation and radicalism of those pioneers, this trio traces its own Ongaku a few years after that breakthrough, with the emergence of the lysergic folk rock of Haruomi Hosono’s Happy End, which would go on to found the Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978. A more spiritual and geographical reference—with the historical weight it inevitably carries for the first conception of a truly Japanese electronic pop—there was, in the days of YMO, a similar thirst for discovery through the more playful path that pulsates in Maya Ongaku’s music. Following their debut with the atmospheric and enchanted folky tones of ‘Approach to Anima’ in 2023—a continuation of transatlantic acid folk inspirations that have long since become quintessentially Japanese through groups like the aforementioned Happy End or Nagisa Ni Te—they surrendered that essence to electronica in ‘Electronic Phantoms,’ invoking analog and modular phantoms, where the infinite pulse of kösmische, the dreamy side of United States of America, and the ethereal legacy of Broadcast, guitars straddling the end of psychedelia and the sway of Balearic beat, and the welcoming melodies of YMO intertwine with flutes and that folk aura that escapes into urban landscapes.
BS