Considered a "lost" masterpiece for some time, the music of Yoshi Wada arrived at a time when pop was undergoing vast metamorphoses, subjugated by punk and new wave, opening up avenues of opportunity for artists and listeners alike to seek out and explore. In the early 80s, drone music was largely the purview of the minimalists, appreciated by few outside the cognoscenti, embraced in concert halls and perhaps the odd avant performance space, but mostly relegated to the rank halls of academia. Artists like Terry Riley, Stuart Dempster, and Steve Reich were busy engineering a genre that over the decades has yielded dividends across the spectrum of today's experimental and electronic musics, fields explored further by the likes of Phill Niblock, Ingram Marshall, et al. But many products of the era fell by the wayside, marginalized and largely forgotten; the good folks at EM Records have seen fit to rescue one of minimalism's less notorious practitioners.

Actually, Off the Wall is the last in a trilogy that began with Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile and The Appointed Cloud, both vibrant studies on the application of voice, percussion, organ and especially Wada's bagpipe and multi-horn music box creations. The sounds Wada orchestrates across the breadth of the two-part title track are, the absence of a better appellation, breathless. Along a lateral line of percolating notes he wrestles with the horns to produce a hypnotic yet sonorous environment that ultimately yields a flowing carpet of pulsing textures. Augmented by soft martial drumbeats and an adapted organ, the often-mellifluous constructs resonate with electronic-like timbres, the pipes' clamorous ostinati morphing into something quite otherworldly. This is an intense music that shares affinities with Indian raga as well as Western minimalist tropes, and as such might be an acquired taste for some, though many denizens of contemporary drone singularities can well draw reference points to Wada's silken, intricate mini-symphonies. Unlike the more rigid formulae championed by classicists such as Riley and Reich, Wada's music is more fluid, more gregarious, just as relentless in its forward momentum but with a self-propelled energy that becomes more ingratiating with repeated listening. Magical stuff-now showcased in a re-mastered, thoroughly researched and annotated format, this is an exemplary document essential to anyone with an interest in minimalism's more obscure fringes.