Watch: Kay Suzuki on new VF release Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Ecophony Rinne

The Time Capsule founder introduces one of the most scientifically ambitious records ever made.

“We are not really hearing it, but we feel it through the body.”

At a recent Listening Room event, Kay Suzuki, founder of the reissue label East London-based Time Capsule, walked an audience through the extraordinary story behind Ecophony Rinne, the 1986 masterwork by Geinoh Yamashirogumi that the label is now releasing on vinyl in partnership with The Vinyl Factory.

Led by scientist and professor Shoji Yamashiro, also known as Akira Ōhashi, Geinoh Yamashirogumi is unlike almost any musical ensemble. Formed in 1974, the performing arts collective draws its 200-plus members exclusively from amateurs including journalists, engineers, doctors and scientists. Uniquely, professional musicians are excluded.

“If you are a professional musician, you can’t join,” Suzuki explained. “You have too much ego.”

Over the past five decades the collective has performed around 80 distinct musical traditions from cultures across the world, including Bulgarian female polyphony, Georgian male polyphony and Balinese kecak.

They approach each tradition through deep, embodied study, with the Japanese members learning to inhabit the physical and vocal techniques of the music itself. The group’s best-known work remains the soundtrack to Katsuhiro Otomo’s iconic anime film Akira.

Whilst not as well known as their work for Akira, Ecophony Rinne is the group's most ambitious and extraordinary work. Structured as a four-movement ecological symphony that moves through birth, death, dark slumber and reincarnation, the album became the catalyst for one of the most unusual pieces of psychoacoustic research ever conducted.

Shortly after its original release, Yamashiro compared the vinyl and CD masters and concluded that the CD sounded “properly inferior”. Determined to understand why, he began a long-term investigation into the effect of frequencies beyond the range of human hearing and the resulting research would take 14 years.

His paper was published in 2000 and goes far beyond the borders of the audiophile community – it is now referenced by the Japanese government in future-living policy research.

Working with a custom-built speaker capable of reproducing frequencies up to 200kHz, and a Neve mixing console personally modified by its founder Rupert Neve, Yamashiro tested the impact of inaudible hypersonic frequencies on listeners.

By measuring changes in brain blood flow and brainwave activity, the experiments showed that sounds beyond our audible range measurably increased alpha wave activity and blood flow to key regions of the brain, even when the subjects couldn't consciously hear them.

The resulting paper was published in 2000 and has since been referenced by the Japanese government in future-living policy research.

For the new vinyl edition, those hypersonic frequencies have been preserved directly in the lacquer. The record was half-speed mastered at Abbey Road by Miles Showell, who agreed to remove the cutting machine’s standard filter in order to retain the highest possible frequencies. Three test pressings were produced before the artist approved the final version.