The hook: Yesterday I was digging into the history of Altman's Images (1972) — and stumbled on Stomu Yamashta as the second, little-known co-author of the soundtrack. I only mentioned his name in the context of "avant-garde Japanese avant-gardist who played percussion." Then I started reading about him — and realized that Yamashta isn't a "second co-author" of Images, but a person who landed in the most important turning points of 1970s electronic music while falling out of all its canonical histories. His "Space Theme" sits in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy playlist between Eno, Stockhausen, Tomita, Ligeti, Riley, Jarre — but he's in none of the textbooks on '70s electronics. He recorded in 1971 the first ambient-electronic fusion work in history four years before Brian Eno. Then he went to a Buddhist monastery, found stones there 13.5 million years old, forgotten by Buddhist monks two thousand years ago, and devoted the rest of his life to them. And it was these stones — not Yamashta personally — that sounded at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
Tsutomu Yamashita (山下勉) was born March 15, 1947 in Kyoto. Father — conductor of the Kyoto Asahi Philharmonic Orchestra, an ordinary school music teacher, but a man who put his son behind a percussion kit at 13. By 16, Yamashta was already the youngest member of the same orchestra his father played in. In 1960, at 13, he entered the Kyoto Academy of Music.
Then came Juilliard (1964, at 17, the year The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan), Interlochen (scholarship, instructor — conductor Thor Johnson), Berklee, graduate school. At 17 he sat down at the piano in a New York Philharmonic dressing room, asked for an audition with legendary timpanist Saul Goodman — and played him an improvisation on a table. Goodman didn't just agree to teach him — he gave him a visa.
By 1968, at 21, he's soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Ozawa Seiji (another Japanese). Premiere of "Concerto for Solo Percussion and Orchestra" (Heuwell Tircuit, written specifically for him) — July 6, 1969, Ravinia Festival. 47 instruments on stage — 4 large and 4 small timpani, 3 barrel drums, 9 Buddhist bells, bamboo, glass, wood, gongs. Time Magazine wrote: "The star of the evening was Solo Percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta… After a menacing roll on the bass drum, Yamash'ta picked up speed and energy, began to ricochet from one instrument to another. Hair flopping, arms flying, he nudged, banged, tickled and teased the instruments. At one point he flailed away with both hands, simultaneously blowing onto bamboo sticks, kicking the prayer bells and rubbing his body frenziedly against the gongs". Five-minute standing ovation.
In April 1971, between the 11th and 14th, Yamashta recorded the album "Red Buddha" in London — what would later be called his calling card. Recording scheme: 8 channels, one live, seven on top. On one channel he played solo live, the other seven layered on top in playback of previously recorded tracks. The score was fully notated, but instruments and rhythms changed every 30 seconds according to time-cards held in front of him by an assistant. Quadraphonic pressing — meaning four channels, not two. The listener found themselves in the center of a percussive storm advancing from four sides.
This was 10 years before multitrack stereo became standard. And 30 years before "3D audio" and "8D" appeared on YouTube.
April 18, 1971, midnight, Yamaha Hall, Tokyo. Four musicians: Yamashta, Kosugi Takehisa (future co-founder of Taj Mahal Travellers), Sato Masahiko, Sakurai Hideakira. Six hours straight, before a specially invited audience of artists and musicians. Recorded on LP, preserved as "Sunrise from West Sea".
Sound: sinewy violin waves, gaseous clouds of electronics, electric koto, electric shamisen, organ, processed chanting, occasional radio pick-ups, theremin-sounding tones. Brian Eno would record "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" in 1978. Yamashta did this seven years earlier, in Japan, at midnight, with no marketing budget, no Western release. The album is still officially unreleased outside Japan.
Images (1972). John Williams, then still "three years before Jaws and Star Wars," was looking for a percussionist for Altman's atonal soundtrack. Through André Previn he reached Yamashta. Williams asked him — he agreed on one condition: credit as "Sounds Produced by…", not "Percussion by…". Quote from interview: "I'm trying to get away from the percussion; I want to expand my activities…". Soundtrack nominated for an Oscar. The Images album didn't get a commercial release for 35 years — was only on bootleg and pirate CD, until Belgian label Prometheus released a legitimate 2000-copy run in 2007.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Nicolas Roeg shoots a film with David Bowie. Yamashta didn't write new music — Roeg simply used tracks from his albums with Come to the Edge and East Wind.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, BBC Radio 4, Primary Phase, 1978. In Douglas Adams's famous playlist — Eagles, Eno & Fripp, Stockhausen, Tomita, Ligeti, Terry Riley, Jean Michel Jarre, Patrick Moraz — there's Stomu Yamashta, "Space Theme". Yamashta is the only Japanese artist on this list. Between Ligeti and Jarre. In textbooks on the history of electronic music, Yamashta's name is absent.
In 1976 Yamashta assembled Go — a group that included Steve Winwood (just dissolved Traffic), Al Di Meola (Return to Forever), Klaus Schulze (Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel), Michael Shrieve (Santana), Rosko Gee (bassist for Can). Album "Go Live from Paris" (June 12, 1976) — the first rock album with electronics ever nominated for a Grammy (Best Recording of Special/Non-Classical Recording category). Two studio albums, double live. In 1978 Winwood left to write his solo "Arc of a Diver," Schulze returned to solo projects, and Go disbanded.
Yamashta, by testimony, said in the liner notes of the first album: "Everything up to now was practice". For him Go is the culmination of 12 years of attempts to fuse Eastern and Western percussion, jazz, rock and avant-garde. For everyone else Go is just another '70s supergroup remembered only for Winwood and Shrieve.
After Go's breakup, in 1978, Yamashta experiences a "profound internal change" — what the secular world calls a "nervous breakdown," in a Buddhist monastery called "enlightenment through exhaustion". He goes to Kyoto, to Toji Temple — one of the oldest temples in Japan, the very one he went to as a child. Two years he doesn't perform publicly. Studies. Meditates. Takemitsu (the same one for whom Yamashta was the only performer of "Seasons" from 1970) begs him to return. Yamashta refuses: "This new quest was more important than my professional career".
At Toji, during one meditation, a monk brought him sanukite — a black volcanic stone, formed 13.5 million years ago (some sources say 15 million) under the volcano Mt. Kanayama in the Sakaide region, Kagawa prefecture, Shikoku island.
Before bronze arrived in Japan in the 2nd century BC, sanukite was used by Buddhist monks as an "opening" instrument for ceremonies — striking the stone created a resonance that, according to monks' beliefs, induced a meditative state. With the arrival of bronze — and then iron — the ritual was forgotten for 2000 years. The stones lay in Kagawa quarries. Locals knew them as "kankan-ishi" (clinking stones) — used them for wind chimes and children's games.
Yamashta and geologist Maeda Hitoshi began cutting instruments from sanukite — "sanukitophone". Thin slit in the stone = pitch (like a xylophone). Distance between slits = note. 110 notes — an octave above and below the standard 88 piano keys. Shape of the instrument — not arbitrary: square = earth, circle = water, triangle = fire, diamond = wind. Four elements of Buddhist cosmology — in the geometry of volcanic rock.
Yamashta says: "With normal [man-made] instruments, you know in advance the sound it will make before you touch it. With the sanukit, you have to be in tune with it or else it will not respond the way you want it to. This presents a unique method of composing because of the enormous kind of magnetic power in the stones themselves. If you are not in good spiritual condition before you play them, it will affect the sound being made".
In 1990 Yamashta gave a performance at Stonehenge — as part of documenta, the European contemporary art exhibition. That same year BBC filmed a documentary about him on sanukite. Yamashta: "The stones have inspired the most important music of my life".
And in 2000 at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games — the largest global audience imaginable — sanukite sounded. Not Yamashta specifically, but the same stone, the same technology, the same Kagawa region. Meaning an instrument that lay forgotten for 2000 years passed the test of 3.7 billion viewers — and yet no one on air said whose music this was or what this sound was.
After Stonehenge Yamashta writes the Solar Dream trilogy (1993-1997) — on the small label Kosei, in Japan. "Listen to the Future Vol. 1" (2001) — on Sony, in regular and SACD editions. Yamashta specifically notes: "SACD edition is required to fully experience the desired effect". Meaning a masterclass in surround formats that no one will hear except owners of SACD players.
In 2006 comes "Bergmál" (Echo) — Yamashta's collaboration with Sjón (Icelandic poet who writes librettos for Björk) and Ragnhildur Gísladóttir. Album with children's choir and sanukite, created for Expo 2005 in Japan. Released only in Iceland — due to contractual problems between labels the album is not exported anywhere.
Meaning in 2006, 28 years after Hitchhiker's Guide, 16 years after Stonehenge, Yamashta's main album — the instrument he considers most important in his life — is available in only one country in the world.
First. Yamashta is a parallel evolution of electronic music that was never recorded in the main canon. He made the first ambient-electronic fusion in 1971 (7 years before Eno). He recorded the first multichannel percussion work in 8 channels in 1971 (30 years before 8D audio on YouTube). He landed in the Hitchhiker's Guide playlist alongside Stockhausen and Eno. And he left the Western music industry in 1978, when the industry was just beginning to understand what he was doing. If Yamashta had stayed in London and signed with Virgin or ECM, his name would be in every textbook on '70s electronic music history today. But he chose Toji.
Second. Sanukite is the "sound of 13.5 million years" that passed through three layers of oblivion and three layers of return. Forgotten after the 2nd century BC — returned by Yamashta in the 1980s — brought out at the opening of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 — forgotten again (because no one said on air what it was). And then — the final act — recorded with Sjón, Björk's poet, on an album available only in Iceland. This cycle of "recognition — oblivion — return" itself deserves at least a separate essay.
Third. Yamashta is also interesting because he appears in other people's canonical histories — while disappearing from his own. In Images his name is in one paragraph of credits as "Sounds Produced by". In Hitchhiker's Guide — in one line without explanation. In Miles Davis's On the Corner, in Go with Schulze and Winwood, in films with Bowie, in BBC documents about Stonehenge. He's present just enough for the listener to hear his contribution — and just enough not to remember him as an independent figure.
Fourth. The geological backstory of the sanukite history adds another layer. The stones are named after Heinrich Edmund Naumann — a German geologist working in Japan during the Meiji era (1868-1912). Naumann is the same man who discovered Fossa Magna — the giant geological fault running through all of Japan. Meaning the stone on which Yamashta plays his "main music of life" is named by the German who first understood Japan's geology. And the sound of this stone is now heard through a 110-note range on an album you can't buy anywhere but Reykjavik. It turns out Yamashta restored a cultural layer lost by Japan — but documented it in a format the modern music industry doesn't know how to sell.
Subjective opinion.
Yamashta is the type of musician about whom the industry says "he was too early", but actually the industry was too late. When in 1971 four musicians played six hours straight at Yamaha Hall and recorded an album where ambient-electronic fusion was already complete, no one in London and New York heard it — because the record came out on King Records Japan and didn't travel further. When in 2000 the sound of sanukite played at the Olympic opening, no one on air said "this is sanukite, a stone 13.5 million years old, found in Kagawa" — because television producers didn't consider it important. When Yamashta landed on the Hitchhiker's Guide playlist next to Stockhausen, no one wrote about it in the music press — because the press thought it was just more "stock music" for sci-fi.
And in this sense Yamashta is an exact copy of the same pattern I described in Cairo Tapes and in Images. The official channel didn't notice what actually happened. Film, radio, Olympics — all three formats missed the story that was right in front of them. And the only person who preserved it is a 79-year-old Japanese musician who lives in Kyoto and starts every day with meditation and striking a stone 13.5 million years old.
This, if you think about it, is the slowest way to become great: you write music no one hears, for an instrument forgotten two thousand years ago, and wait for history to catch up with you.
So far — it hasn't. But the stones keep sounding. 🦑