Many people have asked about the name Japetus so there is now a separate page specially for that here. You can read the All Music Guide biography or explore the iTunes Preview page plus an extensive page of info on New Paradigm Journal.
Vibratory worlds
Japetus was born and raised in Sydney and from a very early age he heard music in his head but had no means to capture it. In the school band he played side-drum and learned basic musical form and structure, but it was not until he taught himself to play a variety of instruments including drum kit, acoustic guitar and keyboards, as well as singing, composing and production, that he managed to capture it all, layer upon layer. For 4 years in the late 70's he worked in one of Sydney's most innovative music venues - And Now For Something Completely Different - where he was exposed to and involved with live music almost every day, with the cream of local Australian and overseas talent.
Japetus combined these music skills into audio/visual production and worked for several years as an audio/visual producer/engineer where he also wrote theme music and jingles for corporate videos and ads. To assist in his desire to be a recording artist, in 1980 Jay set up his own recording studio and began creating songs and experimenting with sound synthesis using some of the new digital music keyboards launched in the early 80s. He wrote and recorded over 40 Pop/Rock songs and submitted them to record companies all over the world, however in those days he was still a bit ahead of his time, recording as a solo studio artist/producer, writing songs about social change and extra-planetary influences.
Spiritual paths
Along the way, Japetus stumbled upon the practice of meditation, gathered information on various spiritual paths and gradually came to understand the importance of a higher more universal awareness. As this new perspective of life grew within him so, correspondingly, his interest in a traditional Pop music career began to diminish, and he found himself working in a more instrumental vein. With a background in the connection between audio and visual mediums, Jay began to recognise the relationship between sound, colour and imagery. The more he worked with it and continued to explore consciousness the more he began to 'channel' the various inspired journeys that went on to become the Visionary Journeys catalogue.
Channeling
Soon we will all be fully telepathic. Inevitably though, often Jay could not explain or understand the things he visioned and wrote and created until much later when the synergy of the creation became apparent. It wasn't until he had some perspective on it all that he could understand the complete picture of his ambient, new age catalogue.
Almost all the imagery, concepts, structure, form, flow and relationships for each album were documented in his journals in the 12 months prior to starting the album. With his major work - The Radiant Self album - the journey and the experience were documented as a 'graph' with each section clearly defined in relationship to the whole first half of 'The Journey Through'. Then, he just 'tuned in' and allowed those instructions to 'outwork' themselves 'through' him as 'cleanly' as possible. This was the vision... and there were dreams as well.... climbing 'through' this imaginary, audio 'landscape' while asleep.
Japetus says "If you sat me at a music keyboard and said - play or else - I would play 'Chopstick's' because I have no formal musical training, and guitar is actually my most competent instrument. So it is ironic to have produced all those original 'album journeys' that still hold a fascination for me today as to how I created them. This is the primary reason I don't play 'live'. Fortunately, I am quite a good producer and can bring it all together in a recording."
Framework
Between 1983 and 1997 he composed 12 inspirational albums (plus later - two compilations) and released them through his own record label doing all the performing, production, manufacturing, distribution and promotion himself. This catalogue is an evocative and colourful collection that presents a profound musical framework for exploring the vibratory worlds of imagination and sound for the purpose of self-discovery, meditation and healing. Most of the albums were created on keyboard synthesisers and music samplers, intuitively synthesising his own unique inter-dimensional sounds, perfecting ways to provide the best atmosphere and colour to evoke the particular journey and imagery. Later, he added spoken, guided visualisations based on the original imagery that he perceived when he developed the concepts for the original musical tracks.
Synthesis
Although he has focused on music, as a synthesist in the broader sense, Jay's talents include video producer, vegetarian chef, creative writer and graphic/web designer. To support one of his best-loved albums, Visions Of Paradise, in 1987 he filmed and produced a video of magnificent natural vistas, rivers and sunsets, creating an audio-visual healing experience. This had wide applications in therapeutic areas as well as in the home and workplace. It was even seen for a year on its own Qantas in-flight movie channel as part of a meditation package and he re-shot a version of that video in digital video in 2008 (see Visions of Byron). Japetus has also performed some of his musical soundspaces at various healing workshops and conferences on metaphysics including the Esoteric Sciences and Creative Education Foundation conference in 1990 (where he also held a rare workshop) and of course the opening of Conference Earth in 1995 where Jay also had the delight of providing a live soundspace behind 60's US visionary Dr James Hurtak during his mind-blowing guided visualisation.
Commissions
In 1985, Australia's most prolific writer in mysticism and the occult, Nevill Drury, asked Japetus to produce a series of three albums of inner space music to accompany Nevill's book Music For Inner Space (ISBN 0907061745) for release in Germany and around the world. Over the last 20 years, he has worked with Denise Linn (USA) and Jo Buchanan (Aust.) on guided visualisation albums, produced the soundtrack for an alternative movie called 'Into The Light', recorded and produced a series of Tibetan Buddhist chanting 'practice' albums for Lama Trijam, and supplied music exclusively for the National Federation of Healers Inc (Australia) guided visualisation album. In 1996, Jay was commissioned to create the title theme and incidental music for the 23 part TV series 'Yin, Yang and You' already shown to over 100 million viewers on NBC Asia as well as in South Africa and the Middle East where it still screens on an Israeli satellite network called 'yes'. In 2002 his music and video were selected to support a guided meditation video for the Qantas first class in-flight movie channel. In 2007 Jay was enlisted as Musical Director and Sound Designer for the Day Spa for the Mind website project where his musical soundspaces were used exclusively as the basis for the meditation/motivation modules.
Awards
In 2000 Japetus won Best New Age Ambient instrumental track + Best Environmental/ Message song + Best Promotional Artwork design in the North Coast Entertainment Industry (NCEIA) 'Dolphin Awards' and in 2002 he also won Best Folk song and numerous nominations in 2003.
Global
After establishing his own website in 2000 and remastering all the Visionary Journeys albums for CD/download with new artwork all designed by Japetus, he was delight to be signed to Apple iTunes as an official Label Affiliate in 2005 with my entire 14 CD Visionary Journeys catalogue which is now available for download in 120 countries world wide. In January 2006 Jay travelled to Cannes in France to attend Midem - the world's largest music industry market expo - where he made a range of different contacts. In July 2006 at the International Planetary Society world conference in Melbourne planetarium (the first one ever in the southern hemisphere in 30 years) his music was played during the two evening dinners.
Conclusion
Life is not a monotone. Life is full of colours and sounds and symbols of all different vibrations. Relaxation is only the doorway but there is a whole world beyond that. A multitude of evolving elements that hone the facets of our inner divine crystal self. This diamond must be polished and set and all this takes patience, practice and energy. Our duty is to develop a focused consciousness and navigate our way back from the lowest to the highest. From manifestation, bridging back across to the all encompassing universal sphere, within and without. In today's society it is easy to recognise the need for healing in any form, and these musical soundspaces, the spoken visualisations, the visionary artworks, the video and workshops, all offer a way of discovering a more subtle and holistic sense of self. Japetus
Carl Jung, 1930.
"The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work.
By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.
Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present.
The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.
All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.
The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.
The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, which belongs also to the child, and as such it appears to be inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realise its purposes through him.
As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘Man’ in a higher sense - he is ‘collective man’, a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind."
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