Silk Road

On the night of 7 April 1980, Japanese television showed ground nobody there had seen. The footage came from the first foreign crew allowed into the Silk Road region inside China since the reform and opening up began. Kôji Ishizaka read the narration. Underneath it ran synthesizers. The thirty-seven-year-old who wrote them had already made one request of the network: put this out in stereo.

That was not an obvious thing to ask for on Japanese television in 1980. Documentary music sits behind the picture, and things that sit behind the picture do not get two channels. The fact that he got what he asked for explains everything about this record. It was built to be listened to from the start.

Where it sits in the history of music

How Kitaro got here is in Kitaro, where to start. The short form: in 1975 he met Klaus Schulze in Europe, Schulze produced two albums for the band he was in and showed him how the machines worked, and he took that back to Japan. This is where the lesson first reached a wide room.

One thing separates it from what Berlin was doing. Berlin stacked time on top of a repeating machine. Here the repetition is not the frame but the floor, and a melody arrives on top of it. The melody is pentatonic and it is played on a Minimoog lead. Same machines, different music. The pieces are short as well. Twelve of them, and the longest runs five and a half minutes. That is what writing to picture does, and that constraint makes this the easiest record on this site to walk into.

Note how short that instrument list is. A Minimoog plays one note at a time. Neither Korg is a large machine either. The width of this record does not come from the gear, it comes from the placing. Hold one thing down, lay a single line over it, leave the rest empty.

Tracklist

Titles and timings move by a few seconds from pressing to pressing. The list above follows the 1980 Canyon edition. In the West what came first was Silk Road Suite, which folds this record together with Volume 2, and several pieces carry different names there.

Three pieces, as they go

"Silk Road Theme" (4:12). The opener, and the face of the whole series. What to listen for is not the melody but the space before it. A low tone settles, and for a while nothing happens. Then one Minimoog line climbs over it. One line. No chords under it, no counter-melody beside it. That emptiness is why people carried this tune around in their heads for a decade. While the picture crosses a desert, the music declines to fill the room.

"Flying Celestial Nymphs" (4:38). The middle of the record and its most beautiful four minutes. The nymphs of the title are the figures floating across the Dunhuang cave paintings. What to listen for here is the tail of the sound. The space opens longer than in the pieces on either side, and the tone keeps going after the melody has stopped. This is where you hear most clearly what the man who insisted on stereo was after. He pushed the picture wide and then put nothing in the gap.

"Everlasting Road" (5:33). The closer, and the longest thing here. Where the other pieces each carry a scene, this one shuts the series. Count the repetitions. The same figure comes back, and each time it returns something more is riding on it. What Berlin took twenty minutes to do, he does in five and a half.

The rest of the record

The short ones are scene music. "Bell Tower" (2:27) and "The Great Wall of China" (1:54) are under two minutes, and without the picture they pass like sketches. Better not to skip them anyway. They are what makes room to breathe between the long pieces. "Westbound" (2:57) is the one quick walk on the record, and "Time" (3:30) behind it slows everything down again to set up the ending.

How to listen

• In daylight. If Schulze is night, this is an hour after sunrise. This record was not made for the dark.
• In stereo. It sounds like a joke, and it is the thing he fought for. Through a phone speaker half of this record is missing.
• Start to finish, in one sitting. Scene music means short pieces, and short pieces only mean something in sequence.
• Put it on and do something else. It was written to work behind a picture. Listening that way costs you nothing.

What happened next

The series averaged around twenty per cent of the viewing audience. Kitaro took the 18th Galaxy Award for the music, and the run of soundtracks sold millions of copies. Volume 2 arrived that October, Volume 3 in July 1981, Volume 4 in 1983.

Then it went abroad. Kuckuck in Germany put Volumes 1 and 2 together as Silk Road Suite. Polydor and Gramavision editions followed in Europe and the United States, and between 1985 and 1986 came a worldwide distribution deal with Geffen that brought six of his earlier albums back out. Of the five artists on this site, he is the one who started outside the West and crossed into it. This documentary was the crossing.

The one track to send a friend

Send "Silk Road Theme". Say in advance that it is four minutes. Then add one line. The programme this music went out under was shot by the first foreign crew let into the Silk Road region of China after the reform and opening up, and the composer asked the network to broadcast it in stereo. On television in 1980, that meant refusing to be background.

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.

AmazonKitaro Silk Road on CD and vinyl.DiscogsEvery pressing of Silk Road, from Canyon C25R0038 in 1980.

A single line rises under a picture of a desert being crossed, and in the width either side of it there is nothing. That empty space is the record.