Na Mele A Ka Haku (Music of Haku)
I brought this home last month tucked in a pile of ordinary slack-key & ukulele jammers. With the first needle drop it was fairly apparent this was a whole other thing. By the time I’d finished side 2 I was less sure than ever what on earth I’d just listened to. One thing’s for sure though, the mysterious “Haku” just keeps coming with one uniquely disorienting idea after another on this bizarre no-label 1976 lp. New Age synth washes with nonsensical fairy tales? Check. Kraftwerk-esque Hawaiian electronica? Yup. Excursions into deep space with ethereal female vocals? It’s here, dudes. The one common thread being that you’ve probably never heard much else quite like any of it before. I hadn’t.
[audio:haku5.mp3] [audio:haku3.mp3]
25 Comments
aw man, i want to listen to the whole thing! awesome
This is incredible! Can you shed a little more light on this LP? Is there a catalogue #?
Pick me up a copy if you see another.
Unreal. Please track this thing.
Holy moly!
uh woah. does the whole record sound like this?
Yes.
UPLOAD THAT SHIT YOUNG
whaaaa????
sounds like blade runner era vangelis did a record with some hawaiian dudes. pretty sick. probably another whole genre of music that i missed.
Great find! The female voice in the second track speaks Japanese, right? That might be another trace to follow.
Is there any hope of finding a digital copy out there?
Thanks for sharing it.
-Jay
so rad.
is this actually from Hawaii?
Yeah
i NEED this.
That second track. UNREAL.
Good lord…
My brain just wake up..
Could you put it on rapidshare or something lie that… pleaaasse…
I’ve found no information on the web…
..and thanks for the discovery!!
beautiful
ra – yeah, the woman’s speaking Japanese. It’s about as mindblowing as the rest of the track.
From the beginning –
“I, Haleakala, house of the sun, connected and bound by the sky and sea, give the light of the sun unto thee (plural)”. Or something like that.
I think it’s drawing off of Hawaiian folklore, probably google around and you could find more.
The rest of it is ancestors, the flow of time, rainbows, the young and old, morning and night, etc etc. Only adds to the amazingness of the track.
This is beautiful and beyond amazing. Is there a chance you’d be able to post a few more Haku tracks? I would so love to be able to hear them. Thanks!
Thank you, hcrink! And I second everyone’s reaction – this needs to be heard in its entirety.
Cheers!
That almost melted my entire faculty… I actually had to eat dry ice just to bring myself out of some kind of time-warp acid-trance… i’m going to have to read some kind of self-help book tomorrow, or maybe ride one of my horses bareback into the sunset dressed as a space ninja…literally.
The album was written and performed by a very talented artist named Frank Tavares. He spent about a year in pre-production some of at his home on Maui, and just prior to going into the studio in Honolulu he built a small studio on Oahu to perfect some of the synth programs. You have to remember that back then most synthesizers were not polyphonic and to get them to make a sound at all actual patch cables had to be routed in very specific ways (that’s why even today on synthesizes sounds are called ‘patches’). Mr. Tavares wrote all the words, did all the male vocals and laid down all the music. I believe that at the time, 1976, this was one of the first, if not the first album in which all the music was synthesized. Mr. Tavares unfortunately passed away a number of years ago but he would be very please to know his music is still appreciated.
I was there for all of this and knew Frank. I remember him very fondly. I told him about the Eventide Clockworks “Instant Flanger” which he purchased and used, helped him with some of the synthesizer tracks, spent time in his magic studio up on the mountain in Oahu as well as his place in Maui. Frank was influenced here by an earlier album, “These Trails”, recorded in Sinergia Studio in Oahu in 1972, in which we did a lot of synthesizer work since we were the ARP dealers for Hawaii. I long ago lost my copy so I am delighted to hear this music which I knew so well once again.