Silk Road

On the night of 7 April 1980, Japanese television showed a landscape its viewers had never seen. The footage had been shot by the first foreign crew admitted to the Silk Road region of China since the start of reform and opening up. Kôji Ishizaka narrated, and under his voice ran synthesizers. The twenty-seven-year-old who wrote that music had already made one demand of the network: broadcast it in stereo.

That was not an obvious thing to ask for on Japanese television in 1980. Documentary music lives behind the picture, and nobody spends two channels on something behind the picture. That he got his way tells you everything about this record. It was made for listening from the first note.

Where it sits in the history of music

The road that led Kitaro here is told in Kitaro, where to start. In short: he met Klaus Schulze in Europe during his band years; in 1975 Schulze mixed one album for the band Kitaro was in, produced the next and showed him how to work the synthesizers, and Kitaro took what he learned home to Japan. This record is where that lesson first reached a large audience.

One thing sets it apart from Berlin. Berlin built long spans of time on a repeating machine. Here the repetition is not the structure but the ground, and a melody rides over it: a pentatonic line on a Minimoog lead. Same machines, different music. The pieces are short, too. There are twelve, and the longest runs five and a half minutes, because music written to picture has to be brief. That constraint makes this the easiest record on this site to walk into.

That instrument list is short. A Minimoog plays one note at a time, and neither Korg is a big machine. The width of this record comes from placement, not gear: hold one sound down, lay a single line over it, leave the rest empty.

Tracklist

Titles vary from pressing to pressing, and timings shift by a few seconds. The list above follows the 1980 Canyon edition. In the West the first release was Silk Road Suite, which combines this record with Volume 2 and gives several pieces different names.

Three pieces up close

"Silk Road Theme" (4:12). The opener, and the signature of the whole series. Listen less for the melody than for the moment before it. A low tone settles in, and for a while nothing happens. Then a single Minimoog line climbs above it. Just the one line, with no chords beneath it and no countermelody beside it. That emptiness is why the tune stayed in people's heads for a decade. While the camera crosses the desert, the music leaves most of the room empty.

"Flying Celestial Nymphs" (4:38). The centrepiece, and the loveliest four minutes on the record. The nymphs of the title are the figures that float across the cave paintings at Dunhuang. Listen for the decay. The space stays open longer than in the pieces around it, and the sound hangs on after the melody stops. Here more than anywhere you can hear what the man who fought for stereo was after. He spread the sound wide and put nothing in the space.

"Everlasting Road" (5:33). The closer, and the longest track. The other pieces each carry a single scene; this one closes the whole series. Count the repeats. The same figure keeps coming back, and every time it returns, one more layer rides on top. What Berlin took twenty minutes to do, Kitaro does in five and a half.

The rest of the record

The short pieces are cues for single scenes. "Bell Tower" (2:27) and "The Great Wall of China" (1:54) both run under three minutes, and without the pictures they go by like sketches. Don't skip them. They give the longer pieces room to breathe. "Westbound" (2:57) is the only piece here with a quick step, and "Time" (3:30), right after it, slows things down again to set up the ending.

How to listen

• In daylight. If Schulze is night, this is an hour after sunrise. It wasn't made for the dark.
• In stereo. It sounds too obvious to say, but stereo is what he fought for. Through a phone speaker, half the record is gone.
• Start to finish, in one sitting. Scene music means short pieces, and short pieces only make sense in sequence.
• Put it on and do something else. It was written to work behind pictures, so you lose nothing by listening that way.

What happened next

The series averaged a rating of around 20 per cent. Kitaro's music earned a commendation (senshō) in the television category of the 18th Galaxy Awards, and the soundtrack albums sold millions of copies. Volume 2 arrived that October, Volume 3 in July 1981, Volume 4 in 1983.

Then the music travelled. In Germany, Kuckuck combined Volumes 1 and 2 as Silk Road Suite. Polydor and Gramavision editions followed in Europe and the United States, and in 1985 and 1986 a worldwide distribution deal with Geffen put six of his earlier albums back in circulation. Of the five artists on this site, Kitaro is the only one who started outside the West and crossed over. This documentary was his bridge.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Silk Road Theme". Tell them first that it runs four minutes, then add one line. The series this music was written for was filmed by the first foreign crew allowed into China's Silk Road region after reform and opening up, and the composer asked the network to broadcast it in stereo. On television in 1980, that was a refusal to be background music.

Under footage of a desert crossing, a single line rises, and the wide space on either side of it stays empty. That empty space is the record.

Where to get it

The Japanese Canyon original is the face of this record. In the West, Silk Road Suite, which combines Volumes 1 and 2, stayed in print through Kuckuck, Gramavision and Domo, and it is the easier one to find. The names on it differ, so keep the list above beside you.

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