I’ve talked on and on about Toshio Tokage’s acclaimed album The Gold Sutras, but I haven’t said much. How can I describe it? The Gold Sutras were a collection of electronic hymns, buzzes and whirrs, automated drumbeats, noises taken out of context (that’s called sampling, you know), and bells put in intermittently to command the listener to have reverence for the Gold Lady. It’s a meditative and spiritual body of work and the Gold Lady’s image adds so much to it because she looks so sexy. Those lips and elegantly bald head—who could not just fall down and bow in reverence after looking at her?
You know they met in Tokyo, at the Number One school in the whole world, where Toshio was studying for an MFA in musical composition, The Gold Lady had just left the Zen convent where she grew up. Toshio struggeled to tap his ideas into a piano and he had destroyed a few guitars in frustration. Even though Tokyo University had admitted him into the music program as a promising young composer, his ability to create music was starting to become expensive until he met the Gold Lady. She kissed him and that’s all it took to cure him.
He looked into her immortal eyes, and he was soon hammering out melodies on an old electrical Wulitzer piano. He wrote pages and and pages of music, some of which became The Gold Sutras and some material derivative of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that would become the basis of his film soundtrack music. All the good material was recorded with a band called Lizard, which is a translation of his last name.
Despite the disappointment of the tracks being strictly instrumental and no vocals from the Gold Lady were anywhere to be heard, The Gold Sutras went number 1 in Japan, England, and the Ibiza dance floors, and Number 5 in the U.S. Stupid Americans.
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