Cosmic Invention Help Your Satori Mind Vinyl

In 1996, MASAKI BATOH, who’d spent the previous decade recording, playing and living in a hippie communal environment with the heavy chamber folk out fit GHOST, formed a new unit to play in a different manner.

He’d just finished making an incredible new Ghost album, Lama Rabi Rabi, but making music with Ghost was a intense and spiritual endeavor; for a change, Batoh wanted simply to enjoy, with a free and open mind, the playing of the kind of music that he and his musical friends had grown up with; the ’70s sounds of British, American and Japaneser rock.

Help Your Satori Mind is a result of things they just naturally jammed on during a couple of sessions. It’s totally out of Ghost’s world. Along with Batoh were fellow Ghosts FUJI on congos and MICHIO KURIHARA (a modern psychedelic rock guitar god, previously in WHITE HEAVEN, and eventually joining with DAMON & NAOMI). Also invited were notoriously crazy drummer virtuoso FUTOSHI OKANO from Osaka’s heavy rock trio, SUBERT BLAZE, bassist CHIYO KAMEKAWA from YURA YURA TEIKOKU and organist/pianist JUN KOTO from KAKASHI. Together, they were COSMIC INVENTION.

The sound of Cosmic Invention was equal parts exploratory and explosive, accessing classical modes of pychedelic and progressive rock and roll music. These guys were so powerful when they played together, Batoh eventually recruited them to form most of the lineup for Ghost’s second US tour, in 1997, after Lama Rabi Rabi was released.