The Six Great Elements

Rokudai engi, or “origination from the Six Great Elements,” is a foundational Shingon Buddhist concept—the belief that everything that exists in the universe is composed of the elements of earth, water, fire, wind, air (space), and mind (consciousness).

The six albums that make up Japanese keyboardist Masabumi Kíkuchi’s Rokudai series, each one named after and dedicated to one of these elements, were recorded between 1984 and 1987, first released on CD in 1988 and then as a LaserDisc set in 1991. Kíkuchi’s recordings had never been pressed to vinyl and had gone largely overlooked until the Japanese writer, DJ, collector, and curator Masaaki Hari decided to fill that gap.

The founder and producer of the Tokyo-based music label rings, Hari had first discovered Kíkuchi’s Rokudai series in the mid-1990s, seven or eight years after its original release. “At the time, it was difficult to get hold of [those CDs] even in Japan,” he remembers. Rokudai had failed to reach a wider audience, and the original CD series had quickly disappeared from the market. It didn’t help that the Geronimo label, which issued the first limited pressing, went out of business soon after its release.

It was only after Masabumi Kikuchi’s passing in 2015, at the age of 75, that interest in these works began to grow overseas. In general, music from 1980s Japan lived through a resurgence with collectors around the late aughts. Shortly after, streaming platform algorithms started recommending long-forgotten works of environmental music, featuring composers like Midori Takada or Hiroshi Yoshimura, to insular laptop workers, and to great success.

In this new and more appreciative climate, the original Rokudai CDs became a highly sought after collectible. Masaaki Hara had pondered the idea of a reissue for some time and eventually found the right partners for the project in Japanese distributor Disk Union, enlisting the help of Taylor Deupree, a renowned mastering engineer and notable producer of ambient music, to remaster the work from the original tapes.

Back when it was first released, Rokudai confused the listening public. Masabumi Kikuchi was known as one of the great Japanese jazz pianists; he’d played and recorded with Gary Peacock and Johnny Hartman, Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Dave Liebman and Al Foster. Even though this strange, sparse music was mostly improvised in the studio, it sounded much more like electroacoustic art music than anything Kikuchi had been involved with previously.

Born in 1939, Kikuchi had studied music in Tokyo and played with people like Lionel Hampton and the late Sonny Rollins when they were touring Japan in the 1960s. At the end of the decade, he briefly moved to the United States after winning a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music, then moved back to Japan, only to return to the States in 1974, this time settling in New York City for good.

Working as a keyboarder in Gil Evans’s Monday Night Orchestra in the second half of the 1970s, the pianist got deeply into funk and jazz fusion and increasingly swapped his acoustic piano for an electric model or an early synthesizer. His album Susto, recorded in the fall of 1980, reflected that new musical direction, and after continuing down that route on One-Way Traveller (1982), he’d veer off into even more experimental explorations of early electronic music.

In his Brooklyn loft, the pianist started collecting all sorts of synthesizers and drum machines, over time transforming the humble space into an actual recording studio. His favorite tool was the Yamaha DX7, whose characteristic sound is often associated with that era, but he also owned several Moog and Korg synthesizers, Roland sequencers, and Oberheim drum machines. Spending a lot of time alone at home with his gear, he developed a practice of recording his improvised jam sessions directly to two-track analog tape and mixing it live on the fly, without overdubs.

Inspiration at the time came from electroacoustic music composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis—both of whom he’d started studying since moving to New York—but also from Brian Eno’s idea of ambient music and the Japanese movement of kankyo ongaku (“environmental music”), a minimalist style of music often composed for site-specific spaces, like commissioned soundtracks for museums and galleries.

It’s at least interesting to note how such an artful, explorative body of work was effectively funded by corporate capital straight from Japan’s 1980s bubble economy: The music on Rokudai was commissioned by the Japanese ad agency Dentsu for a video project in the kankyo ongaku style, as part of a series called Neo-Japanesque, “which presented the good aspects of traditional Japan from a new perspective,” as Masaaki Hara explains.

Because the music was originally designed as an aural accompaniment to visual images, Kikuchi used his synthesizers not merely to imitate sounds from the natural world but also to evoke their actual physicality in the mind of the listener, employing a unique sense of space, which Hara refers to as “a characteristically Japanese form of expression.”

The Buddhist scholar, Shingon Buddhist priest, and literature professor Suyu Kanaoko wrote about Rokudai’s spiritual aspects for its first release on CD in 1988, explaining how the Six Great Elements are inseparable from one another: “The function of fire does not exist in isolation. Just as water, earth, wind, and space arise from the sun, the fundamental life force that animates everything in the universe appears to the human eye as six separate forces. Each of the six forces can be perceived individually, yet none of them exist independently. They are harmoniously fused into a single, undivided whole.”

Kanaoko remembers their breakthrough upon first hearing the recordings: “Having finished listening [to Rokudai], I came to realize that we can return to our original state of engaging all of our senses to grasp the totality of the cosmic forces (the Six Great Elements), which were once only expressed in words. . . . This work signals the emergence of a new form of spiritual activity, one grounded in the whole body and awakened through all the senses.”

“This work signals the emergence of a new form of spiritual activity, one grounded in the whole body and awakened through all the senses.”

By now it should have become clear that Rokudai isn’t exactly light, mellow background music—a lot of it is actually quite challenging, calm and sparse for longer periods but also dynamic and energetic at times. On some of the pieces, DX7 chord stabs and robotic drum machine beats even feel distantly related to the punk-funk fusion of the Downtown 1980s art scene.

Just listen to the Earth opener “Reggae Triste,” which sounds similar to the dub-jazz fusion that Bill Laswell would play with his band Material at the time. Other pieces sound more like the musique concrète of Luc Ferrari, and others might resemble Ryuichi Sakamoto’s and Haruomi Hosono’s melodic but minimalist post–Yellow Magic Orchestra work.

The decision to record this as real-time performances instead of doing multitrack recordings certainly leads to an extreme limitation, but as we know, conscious constraints can work as enablers of creativity. “Multitracking provides too much wiggle room,” Kikuchi wrote in the original liner notes, “and that prompts you to start organizing your thoughts. Once you start organizing your thoughts, that’s the same as regression.”

Still, the music on Rokudai wasn’t fully improvised either. More than 500 pages of handwritten scores and printed documents were found after Kikuchi’s passing, possibly as some sort of blueprint for his improvisations; he might as well have made those plans just to discard them during his studio performances, which is actually the way that Cecil Taylor would often work.

When he recorded Rokudai, the seasoned pianist was in his mid- to late 40s. He’d had a solid career as a jazz musician but was looking for new ways to express himself. While on the surface Rokudai doesn’t sound like jazz, its core principles and techniques are deeply engrained and embedded in the music. “[It] represents a true fusion of jazz and electronic music,” Hara argues. “I believe it offers an approach that continues to inspire both contemporary jazz musicians and electronic musicians alike.”

So why should anyone listen to this in 2026 when the music wasn’t even popular when it was created forty years ago? The answer to this question is accessible only to those that care to listen deeply and intently, then as now.

“People are seeking an environment where they can truly immerse themselves in sound,” Hara claims, pointing to the spreading of “jazz kissa,” Japanese-style listening bars, and audiophile listening rooms over the last several years. Referring to a spot in Tokyo where he regularly plays sophisticated music to attentive audiences, he concludes: “The experience of listening together with others is refreshing, and records like Rokudai are perfect for [this].”