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Spirited Away by Sacred Shinto Solemnities

Crazy Fox | Chicago, IL USA | 05/08/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Generally speaking, I love Japanese music and have a deep interest in Japanese religion, so it's obvious why I couldn't resist this CD. Strange to say, though, I was also dreading it. I've listened to more than one CD along these lines (featuring field recordings of Japanese ritual and festival music) which, no matter how dutifully I listened, only served to grate terribly on my ears. "Japanese Shinto: Ritual Music" was a pleasant surprise, then, for this is really some fantastic music, full of dynamic rhythms and sonorous flutes accompanying powerful (if sometimes a bit high-pitched) singing. Far from "dutifully" listening, I found myself enjoying the whole CD and getting totally carried away more than once, "spirited away" as it were.



Now these are indeed field recordings, and so the sound quality is less than crystal clear and the acoustics are a bit funny in spots. People cough, babies cry, gravel crunches, microphones crackle, and reality happens. On the other hand, that means that this is the real thing, the genuine article, not something staged in a studio somewhere. It's almost as if you're taken on a virtual tour of various Shinto shrines throughout Japan at key moments in their ritual calendars. That's surely worth a teensy bit of background noise and audio fuzz.



The range of selections is also quite good, from stately chants by official priests to boisterous festival songs, from sparsely refined Noh performances to eerily charismatic invocations by a shamaness, from famous shrines like Fushimi Inari in Kyoto to local shrines in Japan's boondocks both northeast and southwest. Basically a fair representation, and quite without monotony. The only real drawback is that there are absolutely no liner notes, except for some minimal (but still helpful) information on the back of the CD case--the listener is given next to no clue about what is going on in each track, and must basically fall back on whatever knowledge they have of Japanese religion already to make sense of what they're hearing. There's much that's rich in interest and significance here that'll unfortunately be lost without such details, though the no-frills approach may result in better affordability. So it goes, I suppose.



In any case, though, this CD is very much worth a listen for those interested in Japanese music and/or religion, and may also be relevant as well as enjoyable for any ethnomusicologists out there. Recommended despite the rather generic packaging."