Photo by Celine Fougerouse
A planet destroyed by a divine conflict, a new world born from the ashes of the old, completing an eternal, mystical cycle; magical volcanoes, healing lakes, goddesses, serpents, a sense of apocalypse. Welcome to Kuurandia, the fictional universe created by Japanese psychedelic folk band KUUNATIC.
“The main theme of our stories is always a mix of mythology, science-fiction, and actual events that happened on our Earth. We mix them to create our fantasy world,” says Fumie Kikuchi, the band’s keyboardist. They take the same approach with music. “We all have completely different ideas and musical interests. We find some interesting sources and combine our ideas. The final effect is always completely different from the original idea.” When asked who in the band has the weirdest music taste, they answer without hesitation: Yuko Araki, the group’s drummer. When she’s not playing in KUUNATIC, she makes harsh noise under her own name.
The band spawned from a short-lived project of Kikuchi’s with two foreign students: Angie, from Venezuela, and Sanni, from Finland. When Sanni had to return to Finland, Araki filled in on the drums. After Angie’s departure, the line-up was completed by bassist Shoko Yoshida. From the very beginning, KUUNATIC wanted to mix tradition and modernity. “It was our original idea—we were thinking about making some sort of cultural exchange, and experimenting with mixing Japanese and Venezuelan traditional cultures,” says Araki. It’s visible in their name, derived from kuu, the Finnish word for the moon. “’Kuunatic’ means lunatic. We all like something related to the moon and our music is a bit weird and crazy so we thought Kuunatic would be perfect for us,” Kikuchi explained in an early interview.
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), 2 x Vinyl LP, Vinyl
Their first EP, released independently, hinted at the direction they would take on later records. Neither 100% rock nor 100% folk, Kuurandia is like a rollercoaster, with motifs and riffs changing constantly over its four tracks. Written when Angie was still in the band, the songs retain echoes of Latin music, but what is most striking is the band’s originality and coherence. With the EP and a European tour under their belt, the band soon drew the attention of Glitterbeat, one of the boldest labels on the continent. Their debut album, Gate of Klüna, was like a blast from the unknown: tribal, focused, hypnotic, and sparse. It brought them further recognition abroad, but in Japan they are “still a niche group, maybe some hard core music lovers know about us,” Araki laughs.
Almost four years have passed between the release of The Gates of Klüna and the band’s new record, Wheels of Ömon. One of the reasons is geography. “It’s hard for us to meet and rehearse regularly, we live now in three different countries,” Kikuchi says. She moved to Taiwan and Yoshida resides in London; Araki is the only one who stayed in Tokyo. “We wrote our previous album together, either when we were all in Japan or touring,” says Kikuchi. They started working on their sophomore album online, exchanging ideas whenever they could. It turned out to be too challenging for the band—so when Araki found a residency program organized by PALP Festival in the Swiss Alps, they “saw a great opportunity to finish our album. Staying in one place for more than a week, focused on composing, no distractions—an ideal situation,” says Araki.
The time spent in the mountains left its mark on Wheels of Ömon, which tells the story of a single 45-hour-long year in Kuurandia, complete with fleeting seasons, strange rituals and a prophecy. The majestic summits and valleys of the Alps inspired KUUNATIC to delve even deeper into the history of their fantasy world and make it “clearer and more vivid. Our fantasy is rooted in the real world,” Araki explains, adding that the Earth has survived many ends of the world during its existence. “Many people believe that our world will end in some kind of a natural disaster—a meteor impact or a huge volcano eruption.” This is what happened in Kuurandia, although the band won’t specify if Kuurandia is “a story from an ancient past or a distant future—we don’t know it.” “It’s a cycle, a never-ending one,” says Kukicho. “Kuurandia was created from pieces of another, destroyed planet.”
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
As with their debut EP, KUUNATIC employ traditional instruments as a means to connect the past and the present, but Wheels of Ömon takes it one step further. “Carrying on the tradition, continuing and spreading the culture of traditional instruments in new contexts is extremely important for us,” Kukicho says. Some of the dozen-plus instruments used on Wheels of Ömon are still played in Japan, but almost never by rock or pop bands. Among them is a kagurabue, used in the shrine music. “I’ve been playing it since I can remember. I carry it with me almost all the time” Kukicho says. Shō, an instrument emblematic of gagaku, a style of Japanese court music, starts and ends with the reed instrument’s human voice-like sound. “I really wanted to put shō on the album… I also play wadaiko, a drum used during folk festivals,” Araki says. KUUNATIC are not only inspired by Japanese traditional music—Wheel of Ömon has echoes of post-punk, cold wave, and even Bulgarian polyphonic singing; opening track “Yew’s Path” evokes Middle-Eastern tinged stoner metal in the vein of OM.
The sole guest on the album is Rekpo, an Ainu vocalist performing with OKI and a member of vocal group Marewrew. “We played some concerts together in 2022, we knew her from Marewrew and we really liked her voice,” Kukicho says. When the band was thinking about including a folk song on the album, they immediately reached out to Rekpo. “We exchanged some emails, explaining the concept of the album. Rekpo thought of a song sung during labors or to accelerate a ritual. It speaks of a god of destruction and disaster approaching in a boat on the ocean. We thought it suited the album perfectly,” Araki says.
Shamanism and animism constitute an important part of Japanese culture to this day. Shinto, an indigenous religion, combines elements of both, and as many as 80% of the Japanese practice some of its rites. “Shamanism has been present through my whole life. My mom is kind of a shaman, maybe more of a medium,” Kukicho says. “Animism is omnipresent in Japan, we grew up surrounded by it,” says Araki. It’s reflected in the trio’s shows, which are highly theatrical. The band says they want “to synchronize ourselves with the audience, we want to present our show as a ritual.” Every detail matters: makeup, outfits, onstage movements. Everything has to help the band transport the audience to Kuurandia, a strange but somehow familiar world whose fate is a warning to the 21st-century Earth.
