Volk von Bauhaus

Kokubo’s desire to create music that was neither overly composed, nor had any particular strong message to put across, was realized when he first laid hands on a Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument). The A-side to the album consists of two-bar repetitions enabled by this “new tool,” as Kokubo puts it.

“I wanted to make music the same way that Picasso paints.”

There are snippets of birdsong, a resonant cavalcade of marimba and breathy pads in a gleaming zoetrope of sound that whirls endlessly in ‘Playing Among the Gods,’ whereas ‘Melancholy II’ transforms the atmosphere into something swamp-like and haunted, a slow, twilit march that feels like embryonic video game music.

These loops, alongside A-side closer — the aptly named ‘Before You Dream,’ which is a sea of glitter ebbing and flowing on a cloud beach of soft, simple melody — are the most legible tracks on the album. The B-side are instead what Kokubo calls “fractionations,” beginning with the cosmic anti-sonata of ‘Fluctuation #1’ with its random, puffy beat.

“They’re all composed by an automatic computer-playing program,” he says. “I’m just changing some autoplay parameters from song to song. So I didn’t make it because I wanted to create sharpness.

“It just happened.”