KUUNATIC – Wheels of Ömon (2025, LP/CD Glitterbeat Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Glitterbeat Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Black Vinyl

Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition

Release Date: 11 April 2025

Kuunatic is one of the biggest PSYCH surprises for the last 5 or so years, hailing from the land of the Rising Sun, Japan. Their 2021 debut album “Gate of Klüna” (Read my Review here) was stuck in position number 2 of the Best albums of 2021! (check full list here) So, Kuunatic – this Psych Japanese female trio – comes back with a sophomore album entitled “Wheels of Ömon”, released as their previous one through Glitterbeat Records. The story has to do once more with this fantastic land Kuurandia. Klüna is the moon of Kuurandia. Ömon is the sun of Kuurandia… But let’s have a look at the informative press release so we can have an idea of the whole “concept” behind Kuunatic’s new album release:  

“First, the facts. Kuunatic are the trio of Fumi Kikuchi on keyboards, Shoko Yoshida on bass, and Yuko Araki on drums. All three of them also sing. They formed in 2016 and released an EP and 7” single before, in 2021, dropping their debut album, Gate of Klüna, on an unsuspecting public.

Here’s where things get unusual. Gate of Klüna was no ordinary album. Following on from their Kuurandia EP, it developed a mix of psychedelic garage and prog rock, ritual drumming, chanting female vocals, lush keyboard textures, and traditional Japanese folk instruments to tell the mythic tale of the planet Kuurandia – a bold saga of magic, volcanoes, and battle.

Now, with the release of their second album – Wheels of Ömon – Kuunatic have come to take us further down the rabbit hole.

Wheels of Ömon builds on the story of Kuurandia, its moon Klüna, and its sun Ömon with more tales of prophecy, mysterious powers, and magical healing lakes. Each of its eight songs pinpoints a specific moment from one 45-hour orbit of Ömon with atmospheric evocations of fleeting seasons and the rituals that accompany them.

Kuunatic’s imaginative flights of visionary fancy achieve the same kind of epic, science-fiction world-building as legendary French jazz-prog heroes, Magma. But their inspirations come from further afield. “The three of us listen to completely different types of music, so our ideas and influences come from all different places,” they say.

In the case of Wheels of Ömon, a huge influence came from a residency at the PALP Festival in the alpine village of Bruson, Switzerland, close to the Vallée du Rhone and enclosed by mountains. Spending time there before recording the album in the Netherlands, Kuunatic found themselves inspired by the region’s rich history and breathtaking scenery.

“We create fantasy stories,” they say, “but it’s deeply influenced by historical events that happened on Earth. So, when we stayed in Switzerland, looking at the Alps and Vallée du Rhône, they made us imagine vast histories of grand Earth and times of several hundred million years ago. We also climbed one of the Alps to do a photo shoot, and we learned more about the area. Through the experience, natural scientific facts were added to our concept, and our fictional world became clearer and more vivid. And we scattered the stories around this album.”

Perhaps it’s this majestic natural setting that has imparted to the new album a deep connection to folk traditions, to human stories, to the very roots of storytelling.

It’s a mood that manifests most powerfully in the album’s varied use of Japanese traditional instruments. The band explains: “This album begins and ends with sho, a Japanese traditional instrument consisting of 17 slender bamboo pipes that are used in gagaku, Japanese ancient court music.”

Throughout the album, Kuunatic also play chappa (hand-sized cymbals used at temple rituals or festivals), sasara (a percussion instrument of 108 wooden plates strung with a cotton cord), ryuteki (a flute used in gagaku), kagurabue (a flute used for Japanese traditional shrine music), ougidaiko (a fan-shaped hand drum), kokiriko (small bamboo stick instruments), and wadaiko (a huge traditional drum that has been used for rituals or festivals since ancient times).

“We would say the sounds of the flutes and drums we used have a very strong folk sense and atmosphere, and they helped us to create a mysterious landscape,” says Kuunatic. “Sasara and Kokiriko are used for the oldest Japanese folk song called ‘Kokiriko Bushi’ as well, so the historical fact is also included in the album’s narrative. But we mixed those Japanese elements with all different musical cultures and ideas, so this is a fusion of ancient times and modern times, crossing borders to borders.”

One of the most daring and evocative inclusions on the album is the appearance, on the track ‘Kuuminyo,’ of vocalist Rekpo, a member of the marginalised and persecuted Ainu indigenous ethnic people of northern Japan. “We met her when she was touring with Oki, an Ainu music band,” says Kuunatic. “We played together in 2022 and kept in touch. Rekpo is also from Marewrew, an Ainu female vocal group that is on a mission to rebuild and hand down their traditional music of Upopo. They sing this during labours and rituals, and sometimes fortune telling, so we interpreted her as a prophet in our world.”

Voicing the character of a prophet of Klüna on ‘Kuuminyo,’ Rekpo sings the Ainu traditional song ‘Hanro’ with an intimate yet otherworldly resonance that’s surprisingly catchy. It’s just one of the many musical highlights of an album that charts a course from the chilly grandeur of opening track ‘Yew’s Path,’ through the ambient shimmer and ritual chants of ‘Mavya at The Lacus Yom,’ and the stark, insistent tribal rock of ‘Disembodied Ternion,’ to the whooshing galactic prog of ‘Halu Shanta.’

A sweeping tale of far-off worlds and strange civilisations performed by ritual rhythms, chanted vocals, throbbing electric bass, and ancient folk instruments, Wheels of Ömon is like nothing you’ve heard before. Climb aboard and let Kuunatic take you on a trip to the edge of imagination”…

Well, by now, you should be somewhat suspicious of what to expect (or not expect) here, right?  “Wheels of Ömon” contains 8 tracks/compositions. 3 of them occupy the first side of the vinyl LP, while the remaining 5 are on the second side. And what we have here are 2 different sides… The opener “Yew’s Path” acts like a path that “connects” the 2 worlds, the moon and the sun, the 2 albums if you prefer. With the use of traditional Japanese instruments, Kuunatic is creating a dark, mystical environment, but after a while, the scenery starts to remind the PSYCHEDELIC mind-blowing, familiar atmospheric creations of their previous works. A hallucinating soundscape, hypochthonic, with rich chanting vocals, becoming torturously PSYCH, extremely addictive with an amazing tribal-istic rhythm that is your passport to the sacred Ritual that has already started… Taking/dragging the listener down the rabbit hole to a journey into PHANTASIA! “Mavya at the Lacus Yom” starts in an ambient way, full of darkness and mystery, with chanting female vocals, acting like a holy Psychedelic liturgy, a Psychedelic Rite of passage into the other world, an almost funereal atmosphere where the Great Shaman join forces with the High Priestess, leading together, this Psychedelic ceremony… “Disembodied Ternion” has a kind of bucolic start, soon to be transformed into a tribal futuristic Psych Rock anthem, trying to bring all “compatible parts” into a state of Trance, with the final result being quite Ecstatic! Side “B” is way too different; the opener “Myth of Klüna” is a short intro that, at least to my ears, acts as a mournful kind of traditional dirge. With “Yellow Serpent”, Kuunatic takes a deep dive into traditional Japanese music, blended with a groovy bassline, ethereal female vocals, creating a marvelous, serene, mystical Psychedelic soundscape. “Kuuminyo” features the guest appearance of Rekpo – a member of the marginalized and persecuted Ainu indigenous ethnic people of Northern Japan, traditional Japanese music all over the place, well, actually there’s no music at all here, only the voices of the vocalists and a few wooden sticks, a beautiful music-less track that it may sound super weird to all us Western people… “Halu Shanta” is another “different” track. Thrifty, kind of acoustic, and ceremonial, and if you add some “mystery”, you will get exactly the atmosphere of this here, very dark but with an unexplained charming trip-a-delic beauty! Eventually, the album comes to an end with “Syzygy and a Counter Truth”, the band decides to leave us with their familiar-by-now Psych scenery, the one that I arbitrarily named Kuunaticdelia… Superb ending! Mind-Blowing… So, what we have here is 2 totally different Psych sides of the same Psychedelic coin… The coin that we had kept it for the Boatman, to take us to the other side/world… “Wheels of Ömon” is a delightful journey to the other side of Psychedelia… One of the best albums of 2025… TimeLord Michalis 

Tracklist

Links

Listen / Buy through KUUNATIC Bandcamp

Get it via GLITTERBEAT RECORDS Web

Visit KUUNATIC Facebook