Ryusuifudou

In the late 1970s, Fumio Miyashita was living in Los Angeles, having relocated from Japan several years earlier with his band, Far East Family Band. He had set up a small studio in his Hollywood home, with a variety of synthesizers and a multitrack tape machine he had brought with him from Japan. At night he would often record ambient music by himself, mixing the sounds of his synthesizers with natural soundscape recordings he had made in Japan, to listen to while he meditated, and he gave out tapes of it to people he met. Ryusuifudou was one of these tapes.

Among the people Fumio shared his tapes with were two acupuncturists. They played the music during their sessions and reported improved results for their patients. This revelation set Fumio on the path that would guide the rest of his career after he returned to Japan, in which he focused on creating ambient, instrumental Healing Music.

Ryusuifudou is a vital link between these two eras of Fumio’s career—his work in Far East Family Band and his later Healing Music—and fills in some of the gaps of his transitional years in Los Angeles, until now largely undocumented on record. With analog synthesizers and traditional Asian instrumentation mixed with field recordings of natural soundscapes, it shows that Fumio’s Healing Music was not a digression but a natural progression from his earlier space-rock days.