Kikagaku Moyo on Vinyl: Where to Start and Where to Go Next

Kikagaku Moyo formed in Tokyo in 2012 as a street band, five players busking with whatever they could carry, and the name translates roughly as geometric patterns. Go Kurosawa sang and played drums, Tomo Katsurada played guitar and sang, Kotsuguy held the bass, Daoud Popal added a second guitar, and Go's brother Ryu Kurosawa brought the sitar that gave the band its signature. That last detail matters more than it sounds: plenty of groups have gestured at Indian classical music, but Kikagaku Moyo had a real sitar player in the lineup for all ten years, which is why their drifting passages never feel like costume.

Over a decade they built one of the most complete runs in modern psychedelic rock, and they did it largely on their own terms. In the mid 2010s Kurosawa and Katsurada founded Guruguru Brain, a label built to release their own records and to carry under-represented East Asian music out to the rest of the world, and most of the band's catalog lives there. In 2017 the two of them moved to Amsterdam, which put the band and the label inside Europe. The records themselves move: a raw 2013 debut cut close to their busking roots, a folk-leaning second album, a pastoral third, a jazz-schooled fourth made in Lisbon with a Portuguese producer, and a final album recorded in the Tokyo studio where they had started. Along the way they drew on Krautrock repetition, Japanese and Indian folk forms, and the long-form patience of 1970s rock, with improvisation holding it all together.

They also knew when to stop. In January 2022 the band announced an indefinite hiatus, released Kumoyo Island that May, and played a last show at Meguro Persimmon Hall in Tokyo on December 3, 2022. The result is unusual and good news for a collector: a catalog that is finished, five studio albums long, with no filler stretch and no late decline. GOOD TASTE carries all five. Here is how they fit together, and where we would point you next.

Kikagaku Moyo - Kikagaku Moyo (self-titled)

The debut, originally issued on Cosmic Eye Records in September 2013 and later reissued through Guruguru Brain. Five tracks, and the rawest the band ever sounded: sitar, theremin, loose percussion and vocals pushed back into the room. Kikagaku Moyo opens with Can You Imagine Nothing?, which the band wrote during a night of jamming on a swaying footbridge in the mountains, and that is exactly the quality the whole record has. Zo No Senaka and Tree Smoke are where the heavier side of the group shows up first. This is the indie exclusive pressing.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The origin point, and the only album that still sounds like the street band they started as.
• Five long tracks with real improvisation left in rather than edited out.
• An early Guruguru Brain title, so it doubles as the start of the label's story.

Kikagaku Moyo - Forest of Lost Children

Released May 20, 2014 on the New York label Beyond Beyond is Beyond, and reissued by Guruguru Brain in 2023. Forest of Lost Children is the album where the folk instincts and the acid-rock instincts stop taking turns and start arguing in the same song. Semicircle and Streets of Calcutta sit on opposite ends of that spread, and the band sounds anything but lost: curious, unhurried, and willing to let a passage run until it finds its own exit. The indie exclusive pressing is the one we have.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The second album, and the clearest look at the folk and psych halves of the band at once.
• Streets of Calcutta became one of their best-loved pieces and still gets played out by DJs.
• Reissued on Guruguru Brain after years of being hard to find on wax.

Kikagaku Moyo - House In the Tall Grass

Out May 13, 2016 on Guruguru Brain, and the record we hand people first. House In the Tall Grass keeps everything the earlier albums had but arranges it: soft vocal harmonies, warm sitar, songs that unfold in layers rather than lurching between moods. Green Sugar and Kogarashi are the two most people remember, and Cardigan Song closes it with the band's quietest, prettiest playing. If the debut is the band discovering what they can do, this is the album where they can do it on purpose.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The best entry point in the catalog, and our best seller of the five.
• Melody and texture in balance, which makes it the easiest to hand to a non-psych listener.
• A record that works as background and rewards close headphone listening equally.

Kikagaku Moyo - Masana Temples

Released October 5, 2018 on Guruguru Brain and made in Lisbon with the Portuguese jazz musician Bruno Pernadas producing. The band picked him partly out of admiration and partly because he came from somewhere else entirely, and you can hear the decision pay off. Masana Temples is their most harmonically adventurous album, shaped by months of touring and by five players pulling in different directions on purpose. Entrance and Dripping Sun are the ones that announce the change.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• An outside producer from a jazz background, which no other album in the run has.
• Recorded in Lisbon, and the loosest, most worldly-sounding record they made.
• The album for anyone who thinks they already know what this band does.

Kikagaku Moyo - Kumoyo Island

The fifth and final album, out May 6, 2022. With their adopted base in Amsterdam locked down and touring stopped, the five of them reconvened at Tsubame Studios in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, the room where their earliest material was cut, and spent about six weeks there. Kumoyo Island is built around an imagined island, a place of rest rather than a stopover, and it gathers up every thread of the decade: the sitar drift, the folk songs, the heavy passages, even a disco-adjacent turn on Daydream Soda. Knowing it is the last one changes how the closing minutes land.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• A deliberate ending, written and recorded as one, which almost no band gets to make.
• Recorded back where they began, and the widest stylistic range on any of their albums.
• The record that completes the shelf, since there will not be a sixth.

What We Do Not Carry

The five studio albums are the spine, but the band left other material behind. Mammatus Clouds came out in 2014, first on tape and then as a 12 inch. Stone Garden followed in 2017, Live at Levitation arrived in 2021, and the same year brought Deep Fried Grandeur, a long improvised record made with the American guitarist Ryley Walker. None of those are on our shelves, and none of them are where we would start anyway, but they are worth knowing about once the five albums above are familiar.

If You Like Kikagaku Moyo

These carried artists sit closest to the Kikagaku Moyo shelf:

• King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the other great modern psych band with a catalog worth collecting whole, and the subject of our own guide.
• Os Mutantes, the Brazilian Tropicalia group whose 1960s records set the template for psych that treats folk tradition as raw material.
• Shin Joong Hyun, the godfather of Korean rock, for anyone who wants to follow the East Asian psych thread further back.

Browse every Kikagaku Moyo title we carry in the Kikagaku Moyo collection, then widen into the full Rock shelves or dig through Imported GOODS for more of what Guruguru Brain and its neighbors have been sending over. Start with House In the Tall Grass and work outward in both directions.