The Bermuda Triangle

Isao Tomita made his name, following the example set by Wendy Carlos' Switched-on Bach, with a succession of albums through the '70s featuring works from the Western Classical canon adapted and arranged for the analogue sythesizers of the day. For example, his first record in this vein - Snowflakes are Dancing (1973) - was based on works by Claude Debussy. The basis for much of Tomita's fifth such offering, The Bermuda Triangle (1979), comes from pieces composed by Sergei Prokofiev, but this time some of the adaptations are looser, and, as the title suggests, there's more going on than just that.

Nowadays we're told that the Bermuda Triangle is no more (or less) inexplicable than any other expanse of deep ocean, but in the late '70s and early '80s it was having its mysterious moment in the moonlight, as exemplified by such productions as the Bermuda Triangle board game (1976); the TV series The Fantastic Journey (1977) and of course Barry Manilow's 'Bermuda Triangle' song (1980). At the same time, UFOs had similar cultural currency, such as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Indeed, John Williams' famous score for that movie turns up embedded in one of the pieces on this LP.

The listener is guided by the music through a narrative of sorts suggested by the convoluted track titles such as 'Venus in a Space Uniform Shining in Fluorescent Light' (which includes part of the Close Encounters theme) and 'Dawn over the Triangle and Mysterious Electric Waves' (inspired by the first movement of Prokofiev's Symphony no. 6). The weirdness doesn't stop there: in Tomita's own notes within the gatefold he writes: "This album [...] was recorded onto five tracks. Ideally, it should be heard through five speakers, four in the conventional rectangle and the fifth suspended above the center - thus a sonic pyramid" before going on to concede the impossibility of encoding the music in that way on a phonograph record.

What about the music? For all that eccentric conceptual baggage it's pretty good: varied & colourful, although at over 53 minutes' total duration, it goes on a bit too long for my taste. My copy, picked up last year at a charity shop for about £5, is on coral pink vinyl: there was also a clear blue variant as well as the standard black. The none-more-'70s cover art, the work of Don Ivan Punchatz, is impressive in its own right.

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