Rakuen

Written in 1996 / Recorded in 1996, 1997 and 1998

What I wrote for this thing could be summarised in a less than two-minute demo recording, which consists of merely some ideas that formed the basis of what later developed to a song called Rakuen. When four of us initially launched a new band later called School, all of us agreed to co-write our original songs as a team. This allowed me to reduce the amount of my time and effort for making demos and this thing was one of such attempts in our early days - later, I even dropped being bothered with making any demo recording for the band.

When the demo entered to the hands of the 'team', despite the demo was quite a short material, some of my ideas were cut off and length of the song was hugely extended by meaningless repetition of the same sections required from the lyrics written by the singer. While my intention was to write something in tune with contemporary music scene, a bit danceable, modern and light stuff, the singer put almost irrelevant lyrics about Rakuen, literally means a paradise, based on a sort of fantasy world where she was mentally living in.

The video here contains some best bits from the song recorded in various different occasions including; the original demo, School's studio / live materials. Due to avoid any copyright issue, I have cut off any single word that belongs to the lyrics written by her. Alternatively, it contains a few guitar solos played by me repeatedly in which, I wanted to pay my tribute to Daevid Allen and his band Gong, especially during the period they featured Steve Hillage.