Level 8 was the final band led by Ryo Kawasaki, a Tokyo-born guitarist who had already lived one full career as a jazz-fusion pioneer by the time he formed it. Kawasaki was born February 25, 1947, in Kōenji, Tokyo, to a diplomat father and a multilingual mother; he started on piano, ballet, voice, and violin as a small child, picked up guitar at fourteen after hearing Kenny Burrell and Stanley Turrentine's Midnight Blue, and was leading a working cabaret band by sixteen. He studied physics at Nippon University, earning a B.S., before turning fully to music.

Kawasaki settled in New York in 1973, and his break came almost immediately: Gil Evans invited him onto The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix (1974) and There Comes a Time, sessions that put him in rooms with musicians like Tony Williams. From there he toured with Chico Hamilton's band (following guitarists Jim Hall and Gábor Szabó in that chair) and spent a year on the road with Elvin Jones across the Americas and Europe. As a leader he cut Juice (1976, RCA), and Prism and Eight Mile Road for the East Wind label, fronted his own group Golden Dragon, and recorded with pianist Joanne Brackeen (AFT, Trinkets and Things, both for Timeless Records) — a title he would return to four decades later. He also became known as an early architect of the guitar synthesizer: he built his own design in 1979, worked with Roland and Korg to refine it through the early 1980s, played solo planetarium shows built around it, and, when the Commodore 64 arrived with an onboard synth chip, spent what he described as sixteen-hour days over two years writing music software for it (Kawasaki Synthesizer, Kawasaki Rhythm Rocker, and others, 1984–86). A stretch producing electronic dance singles on his own Satellites label followed before he returned to jazz fusion in 1991.

Kawasaki's connection to Estonia began in 2000, when the Estonian National Opera House commissioned him to compose and music-direct the jazz ballet Still Point; he moved to Tallinn to do it, stayed on, and spent the 2000s recording with Estonian musicians (the 2001 album Reval, with bassist Toivo Unt, drummer Aivar Vassiljev, and English-horn player Kristi Keel) and touring across Russia, the Baltics, and Europe. Through the 2000s and into the 2010s he kept working in various small-group configurations there — a quartet, an organ trio, a duo billed as Art of Trio with Toivo Unt and drummer Brian Melvin — largely under his own name.

In 2014 he found the band that would close out his career. He encountered a younger generation of Estonian musicians whose playing pulled him back toward the funk-fusion and jazz-rock sound he'd mostly set aside since Golden Dragon in the early 1980s. By spring 2016 that had become Level 8, a quartet pairing him with keyboardist Raun Juurikas, electric bassist Kaarel Liiv, and drummer Eno Kollom, built specifically to play both his newer material and older compositions in a rock-inflected fusion setting. The band's self-titled debut, recorded and released through the Japanese label Vivid Sound in March 2017, ran thirteen tracks, nearly all Kawasaki originals, closing on a reading of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Luiza." A live document followed two years later: Live 2017 (Studio Songs, 2019), drawn from two shows — Kawasaki's 70th Jubilee Birthday Concert at the Kumu Auditorium in Tallinn on February 25, 2017, and a Cotton Club Tokyo date that July 2 — capturing the same quartet stretching the material out, with a spoken-word intro from vocalist Anne Erm and covers of Joanne Brackeen's "Haiti B" and the standard "Estate."

Kawasaki died in Tallinn on April 13, 2020, at age 73, after a short illness. Later that year, the label Studio Songs issued Estonia Years 2000–2020, a retrospective drawn from across his two decades in the country; it includes two Level 8 recordings, "Seasons" and "Estate," alongside tracks from his other Tallinn-era projects. Level 8 itself did not continue under that name after his death, but its surviving rhythm section stayed active together in the Estonian jazz scene — Juurikas, Liiv, and Kollom have since been credited as a unit backing other artists, including vocalist Ingrid Hagel, in the years following.

Level 8's sound was Kawasaki's 1970s New York fusion vocabulary — shaped directly by his time with Gil Evans, Chico Hamilton, and Elvin Jones, and by his own pioneering work bending the electric guitar through synthesizers — filtered through a funk-and-jazz-rock lens and reenergized by a rhythm section decades younger than him. A Jazzkaar festival review of the band described the young Estonian players as showing "richness, high standards and very good technical level," with "good chemistry and musical balance" alongside Kawasaki, who moved between electric and acoustic guitar across material spanning nearly fifty years of his writing. The continuity with his earlier catalog was sometimes literal: "Trinkets and Things," the title of a 2017 Level 8 track, was also the name of an album he cut with Joanne Brackeen in 1978, a small but telling sign of how directly this last band drew on his full career rather than starting fresh.