Another treasure from Sound Process, a Japanese label, book publisher, and sound design consulting firm founded by Satoshi Ashikawa, whose Still Way was included in the label’s short and excellent catalogue (as was Hiroshi Yoshimura‘s cult favorite Music for Nine Postcards). Oscilation Circuit was a four piece outfit, and this was their only release. True to the label’s ethos of sound design not as a means of filling up space, or “decorating,” but instead as a highly-conscientious way of paring sounds down to those that “truly matter,” Série Réflexion 1 is extremely minimal, though it feels uniquely adjacent to minimalism in its more academic Steve Reich-esque sense when compared with many of its Japanese ambient peers (particularly closing track “Circling Air,” which is almost certainly an homage to Terry Riley). There’s no synthesizer. There are no field recordings of birds or running water. No bells. Minimalist minimalism? Ideal winter listening. I started ketamine infusion therapy last year and this has been a favorite soundtrack during my infusions. I hope it brings you some joy too.
This is a selection of music composed by USSR artists from 1976 to 1995. The cover picture has been taken from the cover of the album Oiseaux Des Plaines Russes by Борис Вепринцев. I prepared this playlist right after my second (Ella) was born and during pandemic times, hope you enjoy it.
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a continuation of the late summer ambient series. It’s also an extra-luxurious two hours long, so I hope it’s helpful in soundtracking a lazy picnic or an afternoon nap. I went slightly off-script this year, incorporating some tracks that aren’t as strictly minimal or classically ambient, and I included more folk, more vocals, and more guitars. Pretty pleased with how it turned out, so I hope you enjoy it. If you do, you can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Brian Eno & Robert Fripp – Wind On Water
2. Yoshio Ojima – Sealed
3. Contraviento – Desencanto
4. Yas-Kaz – The Gate of Breathing
5. Mark Pollard – Quinque II
6. Klaus Wiese – Dunya (Excerpt)
7. lovesliescrushing – Butterfly
8. Oscilation Circuit – Homme
9. Takashi Kokubo – Quiet Inlet
10. Julianna Barwick – Wishing Well
11. Al Gromer Khan – Mumtaz
12. Not Drowning, Waving – Frogs
13. ironomi ft. Coupie – 楓
14. Margaret Gay – Prelude No. 1 in C Major from the Well-Tempered Klavier (Bach)
15. Bobbie Gentry – Courtyard
16. Meitei – Ike
17. Priscilla Ermel – Folia Do Divino
18. William Barklow / Loons – Wail Duet
19. Harold Budd – Afar
20. Bill Douglas – Lake Isle Of Innisfree
21. Nuno Canavarro – Antica/Burun
22. Edson Natale – A Flor
Convenient that I realized that I hadn’t yet posted Virginia Astley’s debut full-length, From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, on Easter Sunday, of all days (though I did share her very important Hope in a Darkened Heart a few years back). While From Gardens is a squarely summer record–suggesting from all angles the soporific heat of peak July–it is about as pastoral as music can possibly be, which means it’s a record that I start reaching for at the first signs of spring. Alongside Claire Hamill’s Voices, it paints a picture of a heavily romanticized ideal of the British countryside, refracted through childhood memories and the heavy lethargy of summer. Both the album title and the track title for “Out On The Lawn I Lie in Bed” are taken from W.H. Auden’s 1933 poem “A Summer Night,” and fittingly From Gardens recreates the experience of a summer day in its entirety in chronological sequence, with the A side titled “Morning” and the B side “Afternoon.”
It’s languorous, unhurried, and arguably a true ambient record in how well-suited it is as background music, something which Astley herself pointed out in a radio interview: “Whoever’s listening could lie down and put it on, and not really listen to it that much. Just have it on in the background.” Songs aren’t structured like songs so much as curiosity-driven variations on motifs–it’s easy to imagine Astley arriving at a piano refrain that she found particularly pretty, and playing with it until organically arriving at the next “song”–all of which flow seamlessly into one another uninterrupted, just like the experience of a particularly hot day.
More specifically, in addition to being a true ambient record, it’s a freak outlier in how nakedly beautiful and fully realized it is, especially for its time. As Simon Reynolds details here, there was no culture for music like this in 1983. Britain was in the thralls of post-punk and post-post-punk, with sounds going in thousands of different and gritty directions but certainly not backwards, and it’s easy to imagine detractors calling From Gardens just that–regressive, anti-avant-garde. There was something very brave about structuring an entire record around nostalgia and what is very legibly a deep love for bucolic Britain, referencing romanticism and Auden and a lifestyle that it’s difficult for me to imagine as anything other than aristocratic. Yet while Astley was classically trained, From Gardens was clearly informed by a vision that was very novel and fully her own: her personal field recordings made in the village of Moulsford-on-Thames, spun together with luminous piano, flute, and xylophone melodies, with small and elegant hints of electronic manipulation: church bells that chime forever, glitchy manipulation in “When The Fields Were On Fire,” the looping sound of a creaky swing swing gate* forming a pseudo-percussive backbone in “Out On the Lawn I Lie In Bed.” Astley is honest in her nostalgia for something which no longer exists, and she knowingly depicts it in an overly-perfect, hyperreal way that suggests it may have actually never existed at all. But it’s all hers, from start to finish: Astley wrote, recorded, and co-produced From Gardens herself, but moreover she saw the gardens, remembered them, and reimagined them in a way that no one else could. Happy spring–I hope you enjoy.
*I incorrectly heard that sample as a swing, but since Astley very considerately labeled and time/location-stamped all her samples, I’m happy to report that it’s a gate!
My newest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is a very slow and drippy soundtrack to snowmelt season. Normally this time of year I make mixes that are explicitly springy, full of bird sounds and optimism. I’m definitely feeling some optimism–I imagine most people are, after the grimness of the past winter. But it’s difficult not to feel a little suspicious of that impulse, when everything seems like such a wash. So: this mix is drippy, with a few small green things poking out, but there’s plenty of mud in it too. I hope you like it. You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. The Seekers – I’ll Never Find Another You
2. Sundari Soekotjo – Bengawan Solo
3. The Sweet Inspirations – Why Am I Treated So Bad
4. Mojave 3 – Love Songs On The Radio
5. Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today
6. Eileen Farrell – Beau Soir
7. The Crystals – Please Hurt Me
8. Esther & Abi Ofarim – Oh Waly Waly
9. Woo – It’s Love
10. Connie Francis – Half As Much
11. Barbara Lewis – Baby I’m Yours
12. Céline Dion – Falling Into You
13. John Foxx & Harold Budd – Stepping Sideways
14. Ziemba – Brazil
15. Gordon Fergus-Thompson – Suite Bergamasque: III. Clair De Lune
16. Craig Armstrong ft. Elizabeth Fraser – This Love
17. The Roches – Losing True
My newest mix for NTS Radio is an hourlong Yoko Kanno special. If you’re unfamiliar, Kanno is a Japanese composer, arranger, and musician. best known for her extensive work soundtracking anime films and series, though she’s also scored a number of video games and live-action films. Some of her noteworthy anime scores include Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, Turn A Gundam, The Vision of Escaflowne, Darker than Black, Wolf’s Rain, and Terror in Resonance. My entrypoint to her work, as I suspect is the case for many, was the terrific theme for the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, “Inner Universe,” which is sung in Russian, English, and Latin by Japanese-Russian singer Origa, who is a regular collaborator of Kanno’s. Since then it’s been a joy to dig through her enormous discography, so I’ve compiled a few of my favorite moments here, ranging from opiated trip hop and jazz to sweeping cinematic modern classical to devastating choral pieces and churning dystopic breakbeat. I hope you like it! You can download an mp3 version here.
Tracklist:
1. Yoko Kanno – Blue Tone
2. Yoko Kanno – Stamina Rose
3. Yoko Kanno – Pulse
4. Yoko Kanno – 縮緬エアー
5. Yoko Kanno – Chorale
6. Yoko Kanno – Go DA DA
7. Yoko Kanno – She Is
8. Yoko Kanno – Some Other Time
9. Yoko Kanno – Bang Bang Banquet
10. Yoko Kanno – Aqua
11. Yoko Kanno – Orphan
12. Yoko Kanno – On The Earth
13. Yoko Kanno – A Sai En
14. Yoko Kanno – This EDEN
15. Yoko Kanno – Ephemera
16. Yoko Kanno – Bells For Her
17. Yoko Kanno – The Clone
18. Yoko Kanno – Torch Song
19. Yoko Kanno – Siberian Doll House
20. Yoko Kanno – Inner Universe
I wrote about this record in 2015, very briefly, and while I’m delighted by the opportunity to revisit it at greater length, I wish it was under different circumstances. Musician, composer, and poet Harold Budd passed away yesterday at the age of 84 from complications caused by COVID-19, and with him we have lost a giant.
It was jazz that first inspired musicianship in Budd, or, as he put it, it was “…Black culture that freed me from the stigmata of going nowhere in a hopeless culture.” He was drafted into the US army where he drummed in a regimental band alongside the highly influential free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. Budd repeatedly credited Ayler with granting him the freedom to abandon time signatures, a freedom which stayed with him throughout his career.
Budd was notoriously resistant to genre classifications, so much so that I feel a bit sheepish using genre tags on this post: “The word ‘ambient’ doesn’t ring a bell with me. It’s meant to mean something, but is, in fact, meaningless. My style is the only thing I can do well,” “When I hear the words New Age, I reach for my gun,” and, at greater length in this excellent 1986 interview:
I’ll tell you very frankly that this whole ‘new age’ business is very distasteful to me. I don’t like being even considered in that category and I have almost no respect for it at all. To me it’s a kind of arrogant philosophical point of view where music has a metaphysical or biological function. I agree that music has a metaphysical function but when that’s your whole point of view, when it isn’t just a thing that happens out of the normal course of events, I think it becomes arrogant and rather precious. It smacks to me very much of science fiction religion and that’s not me. It’s very lightweight and very bothersome to me. ‘New age music’ is a marketing ploy and I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music. The only thing that rings my bell is serious music and music is that way when it’s impossible to analyse: ‘new age music’ is easily analysed.
But new age or not, Budd’s music has a consistent quality of brushing up against an experience of the divine.
Harold Budd with Hiroshi Yoshimura, 1983
Perhaps part of his resistance to being labeled as “ambient”–a term which, by definition, suggests something incidental and negligible–is that much of his music isn’t actually optimal background music. (I would argue that the category of “music to fall asleep to,” which Budd is frequently cited as–presumably to his chagrin–is also not necessarily background music.) I’ll go ahead and plagiarize my 2014 post about The Moon and the Melodies, which Budd made in collaboration with Cocteau Twins and which began his decades-long collaboration with Robin Guthrie. While not all of these observations apply to Pavilion, there is most certainly a slipperiness and synergy that the two records share, as do many of Budd’s other works:
It’s an uncategorizable work, one which far exceeds the sum of its parts. It’s egoless. It’s a fluid, restless record, moody and aloof–it peaks several times, ecstatically, only to retreat back into itself. Startling synergy between these masterminds means that ambient and new age fans will find a lot to love here–it’s Harold Budd, after all, and there are long stretches of huge, hulking instrumental tracks. But the record is darker than typical new age–it feels like climbing through a cavernous skeleton, and the instrumental tracks (like “Memory Gongs”) are echoing and sometimes sinister. It’s not as effusive as Cocteau Twins, and perhaps not as immediately gratifying–many tracks fade out right when you want more the most. It’s not daytime music, and it’s not background music. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, it’s a perfect on-repeat record, folding in on itself like water.
Harold Budd with Satoshi Ashikawa, 1982
Budd began Pavilion in 1972 after returning from his “retirement from composing” with “Madrigals of the Rose Angel,” of which he said, “The entire aesthetic was an existential prettiness; not the Platonic τόκαλόν, but simply pretty: mindless, shallow, and utterly devastating.” Though the piece’s debut was at a Franciscan church in California conducted by Daniel Lentz (!), it was the piece’s subsequent live botching that led Budd to take up the piano in earnest in his mid-thirties:
Madrigals of the Rose Angel…was sent off for a public performance back East somewhere. I wasn’t there, but I got the tape and I was absolutely appalled at how they missed the whole idea. I told myself, ‘This is never going to happen again. From now on, I take full charge of any piano playing.’ That settled that.
Here’s what I wrote about The Pavilion of Dreams back in 2015:
Twinkling, lazy jazz-scapes for new agers. A dripping, humid, reactionary piece of anti-avant-garde. Budd refers to this as his magna carta. Gavin Bryars on the glockenspiel and celesta, Michael Nyman on the marimba, Brian Eno production.
To this I’d like to add that I can think of few records which can so immediately shift the feeling of the room in which they are played in the way that Pavilion does, literally within seconds. It’s the sonic equivalent of taking a few deep, elongated breaths: the pulse slows, the jaw unclenches. It’s an opiated smoke drift in which, once again, everything Budd touches feels weighted with spiritual potency. The worldless, meandering glissandos sung by Lynda Richardson, though clearly delivered in a Western classical style, start to suggest Eastern devotional drone and chant traditions. The occasional chime from the glockenspiel begins to resemble bells used in meditation. And most thrillingly, at times you can hear the creak of the harp against the floor, the crack of a knee, the scrape of a chair. When music is this willfully shapeless, rolling through space like a liquid, it becomes that much more consequential to be reminded of solid objects, human bodies in a room. Everything becomes sacred. Perhaps this is what Budd was after with his commitment to “existential prettiness” at the deliberate expense of meaning. Perhaps this is why critics and listeners still can’t help but try to pin him down with a label: it’s difficult to hear this much reverence without trying to name it in service of something.
