Recorded between 1984 and 1987 in a Brooklyn loft and never before pressed to vinyl, Masabumi Kikuchi's Rokudai - the Japanesque: Six Elements cycle of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Air, and Mind - is among the strangest and most quietly singular bodies of work to surface from 1980's Japan. Gathered here for the first time as a complete set of six double LPs.

For most of his life Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015) was known as one of Japan's foremost jazz pianists, a player who shared rooms and stages with Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Gary Peacock, Sonny Rollins, and Lionel Hampton, settling in New York in 1974. Following the electric jazz and funk of Susto (1981) and One-Way Traveller (1982), he spent the better part of the decade alone with a growing collection of synthesizers and drum machines - a Yamaha DX7 chief among them, alongside Moog, Korg, Roland, and Oberheim units - recording improvised performances direct to two-track tape, mixed live, without overdubs. The result was Rokudai, commissioned by the advertising agency Dentsu to accompany a fifteen-hour video project in the kankyo ongaku tradition, and grounded in the Shingon Buddhist principle that all things arise from six great elements: earth, water, fire, wind, air, and mind.

This is not mellow background music. Across the six volumes Kikuchi moves between long stretches of sparse, meditative electronics and passages of sudden density - DX7 chords struck against robotic drum patterns, pure tone giving way to something closer to musique concrete. He used his synthesizers less to imitate the natural world than to lend it a physical presence, sculpting each element as a space to be entered rather than a picture to be heard. "Multitracking provides too much wiggle room," he wrote of his refusal to overdub, a constraint that holds the playing to the immediate and unrepeatable.

First issued on CD in 1988 by the short-lived Geronimo label, then as a LaserDisc set in 1991, Rokudai confused its first audience and slipped quickly out of reach, becoming one of the more hunted artifacts of the period. Its return arrives in the wake of the broad reappraisal of 1980's Japanese environmental music - the worlds of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada, and the kankyo ongaku current - though Kikuchi's elemental work sits at a more austere, electroacoustic remove, closer at moments to Stockhausen and Xenakis than to ambient ease.

Reissued by rings, produced by Masaaki Hara and remastered from the original tapes by Taylor Deupree, the complete Rokudai is offered here as a bundle of all six double LPs: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Air, and Mind. A missing piece of the puzzle, on vinyl at last.