Kitaro - Spiritual Garden (2006)

After only two volumes, Kitaro has taken a break from his Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai series, based on his travels to the 88 temples of Shikoku. Those temple journeys must have been tiring, because Spiritual Garden is Kitaro at his laziest and haziest. It's not just the somnambulant melodies, predictable sample-and-hold gurgles, and whooping Korg synthesizer lines that make it uninspired. Kitaro himself seems bored, barely bothered to develop anything beyond rudimentary pentatonic scales, crudely arranged drone pads, and tinkling bells. In the 1970s, Kitaro brought melody to space music and carried that through to ambitious works of orchestral world music on albums like 1990's Kojiki. But to listen to Spiritual Garden is to hear someone for whom time is moving backwards, oblivious to more than the quarter century of space, new age, and ambient music released since his debut. Whether it's the Pink Floyd space guitar at the end of "Sunlight Dancing" or the native flute, acoustic guitar, and burbling brook of "Wind and Water," Kitaro is locked in a parody of new age music, his early inspiration now worn into cliché. Fans of the synthesist should find a lot of familiar territory here, and well they should. The same music is already in their Kitaro collection. --John Diliberto