Kama Aina releases his 5th album - the delicate and profoundly pretty ‘Club Kama Aina’ with guest stars Isobel Campbell, The Pastels and Bill Wells -on the Efterklang driven label Rumraket.

A multi instrumentalist and crucially, an extensive traveller who throughout his creative life, has endeavoured to seek out and collect sounds and images from the world over. Just for the making of ‘Club Kama Aina’ Takuji Aoyagi aka Kama Aina travelled over Bali and Cuba, to Scotland and back again to Japan.

Wholly fittingly then, the concept behind Kama Aina’s 5th album ‘Club Kama Aina’, is focused on the wanderer – it is a kind of rumination on travelling, if you will. It is intended as an imaginary ‘club’ where Kama Aina and his fellow guest artists (an impressive array of Scottish musical associates, Isobel Campbell, The Pastels and Bill Wells) play music for those who are, at heart, travellers: -those restless, curious, thoughtful folk. ‘Club Kama Aina’ is a record characterized by a ‘natural’ yet divine beauty. It’s a sweet gem which, to give it a more concrete focus, represents Aoyagi’s exploration and experience of what he calls ‘island music’ (especially that of Hawaii and Cuba). In actual fact, ‘Kama Aina’ is a Hawaiian word for ‘Islander’. Truly it is a fitting name when you consider that ‘island music’ is the common thread running throughout almost all of his works and that, as a resident of Tokyo, Japan, Kama Aina is himself an Islander. There he, together with Maher Shahal Hash Baz and Tenniscoats, is one of the main figures in the currently gleaming Japanese DIY folk-pop scene.

There is an overwhelmingly calming feel to this record - it is as if it has the ability to stimulate senses other than the ears (the sheer array of instruments used help make it a record of sublime texture), and to invoke all manner of visual images. If you were to search for a singularly appropriate image to represent ‘Club Kama Aina’, as has already been suggested, the bonsai tree would be a fitting choice. Aside from the somewhat obvious associations it is the fact that those fascinatingly beautiful miniature trees are ostensibly natural and organic, yet in reality are the product of human manipulation and care. Like these trees, miniaturized into pots, "Club Kama Aina" charachterises journeys, places and specifically islands as songs. It has the feel and certainly the sound of something organic, natural and ethereal, although it is the result of delicate musicality, electronics, and precise artistry...a harnessing of nature in itself.