Susumu Hirasawa -- Beacon

 

Back in high school, our teachers were woven from fairly standard cloth. However, one English teacher was definitely someone who went to the beat of his own drum. His raw intelligence, appearance and reputation were all quite massive, and he tended to go off on rather mighty tangents within class. Some of our comic relief students were more than willing to play off of him. My desk in his classroom was right in front of his desk, and he often confided to me through a whisper and a straight face just before class began, "Should I actually teach today, J?".

One rare thing that unfortunately I never got to see in his class but was witnessed and felt by some of my old classmates was THE TRIBAL EXPERIENCE. It's hard to describe but apparently Shakespeare could sometimes trigger that and when my English teacher was going through "MacBeth" and he came across the quote "...shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him.", that sparked a major march with everyone in class participating as he himself led the troops to defeat MacBeth of Scotland. It must have been quite THE TRIBAL EXPERIENCE in 5th period in the afternoon.

Perhaps in a way, the video and title song which launches Susumu Hirasawa's（平沢進）July 2021 solo 14th album "Beacon" is something akin to THE TRIBAL EXPERIENCE that I never got to feel in my teacher's class. It's been referred to as a religious experience and an avant-garde opera in the Hirasawa style. Seeing the man himself in the video in his dark "Matrix" cloak with that distinct white hairstyle while armed with that guitar and that distinctive voice, I can easily see him as a futuristic man of the cloth commanding a starship somewhere other than Earth. As for "Beacon" the album, it scored a No. 12 ranking on the Oricon weeklies.