Ghost

Ghost (PSF, 1991) caused a stir because of the way it managed to blend Japanese folk music and ambient music, somewhat along the lines of the Third Ear Band. The "Tibetan" trilogy of Moungod, the Pink Floyd-esque vision of I've Been Flying, and the mad percussiveness of Sun Is Tangging mark a huge boundary.

Second Time Around (PSF, 1992) is less psychedelic than it is progressive and folk. The majestic Nick Cave-esque sermon of Second Time Around sets the pace for the best song: the oneiric and Indian ambiance of Forthcoming From The Inside escalates into a galloping Slavic raga, whipped by more emphatic singing.
At the same time, the celtic prelude of People Get Freedom and the graceful medieval dance of Higher Order mark a regression to a more pastoral sound. A Day Of The Stoned Sky In The Union Zoo and Orange Sunshine weave the mystical/lysergic tones of Jefferson Airplane and It's A Beautiful Day into, respectively, a flute and piano dirge and a calm hymn.
This transitional album captures Ghost while the project is evolving from a song format to a more abstract and loose format.

The album Temple Stone (PSF, 1994) crowns the band’s rise with live performances in a Christian church and a Buddhist temple.

The boundary between gothic and ambient becomes increasingly blurred, as does that between folk and electronics. The Japanese band Ghost draws inspiration from the Projekt school (Lycia, Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Love Spirals Downward, etc.) but pushes much further in the field of arrangements. There are few precedents for the sketches of exotic tableaux in Lama Rabi Rabi (Drag City, 1996), for the remnants of ambient noise, and for these acrobatic abstract ballets. The slow and hypnotic trance of Masttillah is woven with eight minutes of Middle Eastern sleight-of-hand (percussion, flutes, bagpipes). That mix of tribal fanfare and choral sabbath in Rabirabi stirs up intuitions from Magma, Gong, and Popol Vuh. The gypsy flourish of Marrakesh bursts into a jumble of guitars and percussion, spilling into a dreamlike melody reminiscent of Light My Fire. The melodies are overly elaborate to the point of nausea, yet always immersed in hallucinatory, super-psychedelic atmospheres. The one in Summer's Ashen Fable recalls the early Grateful Dead. The sprawling Agate Scape prances at a country rhythm until it disappears into a black hole of cacophonies in a dizzying crescendo. From another temporal slice emerge the acoustic ballad Into The Alley, the medieval hop of Who Found A Lost Rose, and the African litany of Abyssinia, all constantly perturbed by ethnic and electronic touches.

Batoh has also released two solo EPs, A Ghost From The Darkened Sea (New Sound, 1996), a bizarre tribute to psychedelic folk, and Kikaokubeshi (New Sound, 1996), an avant-garde work, both collected on Collected Works 1995-1996 (Now Sounds, 1997 - Drag City, 2004).

In 1999, two Ghost albums were released simultaneously, Snuff Box Immanence and Turn In Turn On Free Tibet.

Snuff Box Immanence (Drag City, 1999) presents them in completely different guise: that of folk jesters. Batoh composed about ten acoustic ballads that the others arranged with a wealth of instruments (harpsichord, trumpet, trombone, marimba, vibraphone, Celtic harp, lute, flute, banjo, tubular bells, and keyboards). The result is the medievalesque folk of Regenesis, Soma, and Sad Shakers, a curious hybrid of Jethro Tull and Donovan. But the album teems with oddities, such as the kitsch of Live With Me, a hybrid of Caribbean music and psychedelic pop. Few tracks are ambitious: the instrumental Daggma blends Western and Eastern chamber music with minimalist percussive cycles; and the title track is a psychedelic pastiche, as surreal as Syd Barrett’s ballads and as raw as Captain Beefheart’s blues. The album, disconcerting, marks a sudden step backward.

Turn In Turn On Free Tibet (Drag City, 1999) tones down the arrangements but introduces a propagandistic element. The ballads do not stray far from the folk style of the previous album (though they are much more austere), but the approach is decidedly more political, as shown by the heroic air of Comin' Home and the martial tempo of Change The World. Kazuo Ogino’s flute, Setsuko Furuya’s vibraphone, and Hiromichi Sakamoto’s cello have matured, however, through the orgy of the previous album.
The title track is a suite of over half an hour and seems to belong to another band, perhaps the Popol Vuh of Hosianna Mantra. The melody constantly shifts, the rhythm is barely sketched, and the instruments improvise counterpoints as disconnected as they are sensual. From the initial flourishes (delicate guitar arpeggios, soprano trills, celestial vibraphone chords) one moves to metaphysical suspense dominated by electronic keyboards and percussion. Then cello and vibraphone stage a chamber piece that is devoured by increasingly shrill and deafening drones. The music disappears into a nebula of noise, which gradually takes on the semblance of a bombardment. After a thirty-minute epic, Batoh regains the thread and delivers his heartfelt political message.

With Ghost (Subpop, 2000), a collaboration with Damon And Naomi.

Ghost lives up to its name on Hypnotic Underworld (Drag City, 2004), particularly the four-part 23-minute title-track. Its first 13-minute movement, God Took A Picture Of His Illness On This Ground, begins with metallic dissonances (Kazuo Ogino's resonating keyboards and Michio Kurihara's space guitar) that create a ghostly soundscape. The languid, aneimic, disoriented wailing of a saxophone (Taishi Takizawa), matched by equally dejected bass lines (Takuyuki Moriya), arises from a sparse chaos of percussions, (Junzo Tatetwa) reminiscent of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The jamming slowly ascends to a sophisticated interplay of dissonant, underplayed instruments (last but not least, Masaki Batoh's acoustic guitar). Saxophone, keyboards and guitars repeat the trick in Escaped And Lost Down In Medina, but the music is more lively (with a regular tempo) and driven by melodic motifs. If the first movement was pure disintegration of a message, the second movement is a spiritual gathering of intense feelings. The keyboards still emit sudden spurts of dirty notes, the guitar still drones to the skies, but the saxophone's loud and whirling prayer drives everything into a moving crescendo. Rock'n'roll finally erupts from Aramaic Barbarous Dawn, introduced by manic riffs and cosmic keyboards, and then propelled into the infinite by a medieval choir. This is also the first song, with Batoh's vocals penning a surreal scenario, like Salvador Dali' meeting King Crimson. The suite ends with an odd finale, Leave The World, which is simply twenty seconds of very fast drumming.
The 10-minute Gangagmanag is another multi-part suite: a graceful instrumental dance led by jazzy flute and minimalist organ with spectral appearances of the other instruments; a sudden mutation into a bamboo forest; a coda of pounding piano and drums in a psychedelic ambience.
The rest of the album doesn't even come close to the rapture of the monolithic title-track, but would still be a significant album by the standards of the average psych-pop band: Hazy Paradise is a languid ballad in the style of early Pink Floyd, augmented with harpsichord and King Crimson-ian mellotron; Feed is another languid ballad, but this time in the melodramatic tone of David Bowie; Poper begins as a calm, gentle, pastoral medieval-sounding chamber piece for cello, flute and zither that suddenly explodes in a furious hard-rocking boogie a` la Jethro Tull; Holy High is a frantic and syncopated saltarello that mixes medieval style and modern neurosis with folk-rock storytelling; Kiseichukan Nite is a spoken-word piece with accompaniment of traditional Japanese instruments; and the album closes with the mantra/osanna of Dominoes - Celebration For The Gray Days, recited over and over again in a triumphal procession of minimalist repetitions of church organ melodies.
The title-track is, in many ways, the equivalent of Soft Machine's sixth album, the crowning formal achievement of a group of visionary jazz-rock musicians. The rest of the album is, in many ways, their A Saucerful of Secrets, equally adept at pop songwriting and bizarre avantgarde.

Hiromichi Sakamoto has released the solo album Zero-shiki (1999).

Ghost's guitarist Michio Kurihara released the solo albums Sunset Notes (Pedal, 2005) and Rainbow (2006).