First issued in 1978 as the second release on Vanity Records, Crystallization was the sole album by SAB, a nineteen year old prodigy who, shortly after committing these four pieces to tape, left Japan to follow Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and was never heard from again. For decades the record existed as a rumour with a price tag, an original pressing whispered about and almost impossible to hold. Its return, drawn from the 1978 master tapes by EM Records, closes a long absence.

To understand the album is to understand the world that produced it. Yuzuru Agi, founder and editor of Rock Magazine and the man credited with coining the term "techno-pop", ran Vanity from Osaka as one of Japan's first true independent labels, a DIY operation that issued only a handful of LPs in editions of a few hundred before closing in 1982. Agi's roster - Tolerance, Aunt Sally, R.N.A. Organism, and others - preferred the shadows, letting the work surface on its own terms, at its own pace. SAB belongs entirely to that ethos. Recorded over a single July session at Studio Sounds Creation, largely alone through patient layering and overdub, Crystallization is the sound of a teenager building a private cosmology from a Roland SH-3A, an SQ-10 and an MS-20, a piano, an electric guitar, and a long chain of effects, with brief contributions of strings, sitar, and flute from two collaborators.

The title is the method. These pieces accrete rather than develop, mineral and slow, transparent structures hardening out of solution. Yume-no-ishi opens in a haze of phased electronics and ringing piano that gathers weight as it goes, each repetition adding a facet. Across the three movements of Menou the music turns more spacious and ceremonial, drones holding the air while small bright events refract through them, the sitar arriving like a shaft of light through water. There is real heat under the surface calm - a residue of psychedelia and progressive rock that keeps the music from settling into mere prettiness - and an instinct for placing a single sound in a wide, breathing space.

It would be easy to file this beside the recent rediscovery of Japanese kankyō-ongaku, and the timing is right, but Crystallization sits to one side of that lineage. SAB had clearly absorbed Brian Eno and the Obscure catalogue, the meditative gravity of Popol Vuh, perhaps the rippling devotional reach of Alice Coltrane, yet the album just as deliberately slips those references. Made before "new age" had a name or a marketplace in Japan, it predicts that music without belonging to it, holding instead to its own strange weather. It is closer to kosmische than to wellness, closer to private ritual than to product.

A genuine missing piece of the puzzle, and one of the most rewarding artifacts to emerge from the Vanity story. This edition restores the correct track titles after years of mislabelling and arrives with Japanese and English liner notes and a wealth of archival photographs. For anyone tracing the hidden history of Japanese experimental and proto-ambient music, the wait is over.

Reissued by EM Records.

+ Long awaited reissue of release on legendary Osaka label, Vanity Records, run by eccentric producer Yuzuru Agi
+ Transfer from original 1978 master tapes, high-quality cutting
+ Japanese/Eng Liner Notes