magical power mako's "trance resonance"

it's interesting how much japanese underground music has a ritual or theatrical basis. take masaki batoh's band ghost, f'rinstance, who are pretty pedestrian when they try and rawk out like a conventional western rockband, even with michio kurihara soloing on gtr, but can be hypnotic in the way they blend acoustic instruments with electronics, and do a lot of performances in sacred spaces (shrines, temples, churches, etc.). you can hear some of the same ritualistic tendency on magical power mako's trance resonance from '94, which my sweetie likes 'cos it has a voice output device on it. there are percussion bits that remind me of harry partch's delusion of the fury (see clips below), but of course partch was influenced by japanese noh plays. as hembree would say, "the world is both big and small." mako's also been tarred with the "world music" brush, and he mashes up various ethnic sounding percussion elements with krautrock-style space drone, spanish gtr, and electro clatter, but it's definitely _not_ a "dance record" (as the forced exposure blurb implied). my fave bit comes when he interrupts what sound like bolivian panpipes with random blasts of feedback and synth farts. oh yeah: you can find both this and blue dot on amazon for real cheap.