Matsuri

Matsuri is a song composed by Kitaro. Matsuri means festival And i start to listening again to his songs for the last week. This is will be my Kitaro Month. I feel peace and relax when listening to his songs. Never heard about Kitaro? Ok, I'll try to make a bried introduction about him to you.

Kitaro was born as Masanori Takahashi Feb 4th, 1953 in Japan in a little town called Toyohashi. He started to play electric guitar in a band called "Albatros" at high school. Most of the songs were written by Kitaro, both lyrics and melodies. Later in the -60s he started a band called " Far East Family Band" where he played keyboard. They made two rock albums.

In 1972 he visited Europe for the first time, and there he met Klaus Schulze, who was a real virtuoso on the synthesizer. He also met "Tangerine Dream", one of the first bands in the "New Age" style. It was now Kitaro discovered all the fantastic qualities of a great synthesizer! " With that I can create all kinds of atmospheres! I can create the sea, the wind, everything!" And that's what he has done on every album he has made!

His first solo effort, Astral Voyage, was released in 1978 and was well recieved by cult followers. Later he produced the Silk Road soundtracks, a Japanese Television Documentary Series. His gentle, lush, and majestic melodies show his ability to embody the human spirit in his music. He created his albums in the privacy of his home studio near Mt. Fuji, Japan. Kitaro prefers to call his music simply " spiritual" and says " Feeling is the most important element in my music. "

By the mid '80s, he was still cosidered an underground artist in America, until he was picked up by Geffen Records in 1986. The next year, Mickey Hart, of The Greatful Dead, helped Kitaro with the release of, The Light of the Spirit, which was nominated for the Best New-Age Performance Grammy Award, and he made his first North American Live Tour.

Somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s, Kitaro's style had changed, more theatrical and assertive, while still possessing a certain level of innocence and purity. Kitaro has lived in the United States fot the past five years now, on a 180-acre spred outside Boulder, Colorado in his 2500-square-foot home studio, ( "It's large enough to hold a 70-piece orchestra -- big enough for me! " he chuckles). All though he loves his country of Japan and his origins, he left due to a dislike of the new government and their attitudes of socialism and the distruction of artists' creativity. He does however, return each year to the foot of Mt. Fuji to perform the ritual drum ceremoney, he started in 1983. In this ritual, from sunrise to sunset, he beats towering Taiko drums so passionately that his hands often bleed.

He was honored with "The Golden Globe Award" for the soundtrack of "Heaven and Earth", an Oliver Stone movie. He has been nominated for the "Grammy Award" several times, the latest in '99 for "Gaia/Onbashira".

These are my KItaro collection, only got 2 CDs that i bought at 1997 from album Dream and Live in America:p