In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory, invited to create Onsen (hot spring) music commemorating the city’s 100th anniversary through sound. Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which weave together vanished eras with the ambient residue of the past, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched near the bay.

Over two weeks, Meitei listened to steam, stone, and history. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the spirit of onsen culture. Like water seeking its path, the music unfolded with natural inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep reverence for place. Equipped with a microphone, he ventured into Beppu’s famed sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou — capturing bubbling earth, hissing vents, wind over bamboo, and the voices of regular visitors. These field recordings became the bones of the composition, an attempt to sonify even the rising mist and subtle temperature shifts felt on the skin.

Sen’nyū unfolds as a single, continuous piece. Meitei’s score moves like fog through sulfur and stone, traversing the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral hum of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the voices and atmosphere of Takegawara Onsen. At its heart is a gesture of quiet reverence — for water’s patience, for the land’s memory, and for the hands that have bathed here across generations.

Meitei has always expressed his own views on things and events that are self-evident to the Japanese people but are now perceived as subtle impressions. On this occasion, however, he does not create music based on his own unique themes of Japan. Instead, he launches music into the world that has been created in actual places of Japan, music that can be felt with the hands.

During the project, Meitei also conceived a two-day public sound installation at Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance on the final day. Bathers immersed themselves in hot spring water while listening to the piece through speakers embedded inside the bathhouse — a ritual fusion of body, place, and sound.

The album marks Meitei’s first work centered entirely on onsen, and also introduces a new phase of his Lost Japan project under the title “失日本百景” (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan) — a series focused on existing places of longing, still breathing within contemporary Japan. Alongside the album, Meitei will release his first-ever photo book, a visual documentation of this journey. A new layer is added to the world he has built through sound alone until now.

Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.

The album will be released on 25 July 2025 on 180g LP and CD, with mastering by Stephan Mathieu.


Sen'nyū - San-no-yu

Sen'nyū - Oyu

Sen'nyū - Go-no-yu

3.39.133(3.16mix)

背中 - My Back

Soil #3

KITCHEN. LABEL is proud to present Jewels, the debut album from Tokyo-based composer Ryuuta Takaki, emerging from a new chapter in the city’s alternative wave. His music opens realms of mysticism, memory, and imagination, unfolding like radiant mosaics that echo symbolic traditions, Eastern esotericism, and a neo-Orientalist dreamworld. Takaki shapes music that moves between sacred stillness and ornate intensity. Though his creative path once passed through experimental hip hop and electronica, he has since dissolved into a borderless language that feels timeless and unbound. Jewels stands as ambient music presented not just as sound, but as an object of weight, mystery, and sensuality.

Jewels draws its initial spark from the perfumed visions of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau and the Kegon (Huayan) cosmology, which sees the universe as a vast net of interrelations where radiant jewels shimmer at every intersection. Takaki translates this philosophy into music, building a work that reveals how the smallest resonance can reflect the entire whole.

It begins with “Chrysalis”, a fragile awakening where tones drift like wings opening in first light, before spiraling into the kaleidoscopic “Funnel and Infinite Reflections.” “Kegon” follows as a conceptual anchor, a meditation on fractal harmony where tones layer into infinite patterns that echo the Buddhist vision of interconnectedness. The title track, “Jewels,” shimmers with solemn clarity, glinting and fading like starlight across water. Later, in “Sunken Cathedral,” Takaki submerges the listener into an aquatic reverie where sacred and profane dissolve into one. “Gilded Veins” pulses with lustrous textures, like living currents coursing through stone, before the closing “Celestial Tuning” offers a shimmering epilogue, as if suspended over valleys of drifting clouds, opening onto a horizon of distant citadels.

Beyond its unfolding narrative arc, musically, Takaki’s work at moments suggests the dreamlike, kaleidoscopic qualities of Susumu Yokota meeting a Narada-esque new age landscape. Conceptually, his exploration resonates with Jon Hassell’s “Fourth World” vision, dissolving cultural boundaries of East and West into a single continuum, though always expressed through his own intimate and ornamental language.

Jewels reveals itself as a cosmology in miniature: a living network of harmonies, reflection, and becoming. In Takaki’s vision, every sound becomes a jewel — radiant, infinite, and alive — turning the album into a mandala of sound where resonance and reflection unfold without end.
The album will be released on 24 October on Compact Disc and digital formats, with mastering by Chihei Hatakeyama.



Ryuuta Takaki - Celestial Tuning (Jewels)

Senglar & Arçon de Nièze - Strangled

Chihei Hatakeyama, one of the most preeminent artists of the early drone ambient scene, has paired up with the progressive ambient star Jupi/ter, to create a lush, slow burn, two-part single.

Chihei’s mastery in the art of peace is met with Jupi/ter’s spaced-out breadth of production, widening the stereo field and introducing some of his trademark subtle synth-work.

Support on Bandcamp: https://bit.ly/3X862l4

Canopy / Idyll

Download

Chihei Hatakeyama & Jupi/ter - Idyll

From its first chord, it slips into a playful, slippery dance with darkness, led by the hypnotic voice of siren Anat Moshkovski. Nomok’s mysterious Piano, Rejoicer on the Synthesizer and the airy yet firm sound of Talmudi’s sax, backed by Itzhak Ventura’s Persian setar and ney flute. 

This track draws you straight into Sonolodge III, the last piece in the trilogy.

Eyal Talmudi - A Tale About a Shadow feat. Rejoicer

This is my contribution to the Rusted Tone Recordings: Sampler Vol. 1 various artists compilation.  Recorded using dual reel to reel tape decks and a single tape loop that continuously records over itself, slowly degrading over time.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy!!

https://rustedtonerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/rusted-tone-recordings-sampler-vol-1

A Thousand Tiny Heartbreaks

By deathly pale light, silent is the night 🪡

Ryuuta Takaki - Celestial Tuning (Jewels)

KITCHEN. LABEL

Related tracks