Another one from the understatedly brilliant Soichiro Suzuki, aka World Standard. This is a completely different beast from the last of his records that I posted–it’s effectively lyricless, and is less a pop record than it is a somewhat anonymous amalgam of different folk traditions (though there’s plenty of Japanese folk in here). Hosono provides production and sounds; Hosono would later go on to release Soichiro Suzuki’s also excellent World Standard II on his then new FOA label.
This record is deceptive, heartbeaking, and again, understated–I think I probably heard it two or three times before I properly listened to it. It doesn’t command attention, but once it gets its hooks in you, they’re stuck. A slew of string instruments from all over, very tasteful percussion, and gorgeous wordless vocal layering courtesy of Pizzicato V (!) and Sandii (!). Alternately playful (opener “太陽とダァリヤ,” which, in perfect Hosono form, has an abrupt Beach Boys-esque reverb vocal harmony breakdown), moody (“逝ける王女のためのパヴァーヌ” is an appropriately cinematic version of Ravel‘s “Pavane pour une infante défunte”), and deeply emotive (“水夫たちの歌声” has left me in tears a few times). There’s something reminiscent of Penguin Café Orchestra–the music is pastoral and very evocative, but it’s not totally clear of where or what, and it feels oddly timeless. Weightless and heavy-hitting. If it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.
Todd Barton is an accomplished composer and musician whose lifelong investigation into sound has taken many forms. He has built Renaissance musical instruments, lectured on the musical notation of the Middle Ages, and written numerous scores for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was Resident Composer for over 40 years. His DNA-derived Genome Music has been the subject of numerous articles and exhibitions, and he has released several albums of Zen Shakuhachi meditation music. Since 1979, he has been composing and performing works for analog synthesizer, and is currently a consulting artist for Buchla USA. He’s a generous and dedicated educator, and in recent years has contributed a wealth of knowledge about Buchla, Serge, Hordijk and Haken synthesizers to various online platforms. Among his discoveries is the Krell Patch, named for the self-generating circuits that Bebe and Louis Barron created for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. In the early 80s, Barton began a collaboration with author Ursula K. Le Guin that became the recently reissued Music and Poetry of the Kesh, a “speculative music” for the fictional peoples of the 1985 novel Always Coming Home. In addition to Le Guin, Barton’s collaborators include Anthony Braxton, Zakir Hussein, William Stafford, and Lawson Fusao Inada, and his compositions have been performed by the KRONOS Quartet, Oregon Symphony Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and the Shasta Taiko, among others.
Interview by Peter Harkawik, a Los Angeles based artist working in sculpture and photography.
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Hi Todd, thanks for being here! To start, where are you, and what are you working on these days?
Hi! I’m in my studio in Oregon. I have a solo Buchla Easel performance coming up at Modular 8 in Portland on June 10, and I’ll be performing at The Tank in Colorado in the Fall. I just finished a composition for Tone Science Module 2, and now I’m working on a collaboration with UK painter Edward Ball. The rest of my time is spent teaching modular synthesis and exploring sound in the studio.
Can you tell me a little bit about your process for making an album like Music from the Studio? I get the sense that it was culled from a larger assortment of recordings.
Good intuition! I actually made it years ago for immediate friends and family, including my grandkids. They had heard my work through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and when I’d play them the more serious, more abstract electronic work, they’d nod and say, “Yeah, that’s cool.” (laughs) I wanted to make something more accessible for them. It’s all the Music Easel or Buchla 100 or 200 series, and there might be one on there that’s made with the Haken Continuum.
How does the specific cultural history of the Buchla factor into your work? I’m thinking of the Tape Music Center, Experiments in Art and Technology, and the ethos of the 1960’s. Is it kind of baked into the instrument?
Absolutely. Don Buchla created the 100 system for Morton Subotnick at the Tape Music Center. His approach to synthesis, which was so different from Moog on the East coast, is immediately evident to anyone who has ever touched a Buchla instrument. One of my favorite quotes from David Tudor is something like, “I don’t try to make the synthesizer do what I want it to do, I listen to what it wants to tell me.” If you listen to a Buchla, it will start rewiring your synapses.
How has making electronic music changed since you first started working with synthesizers?
The person who turned me onto the Buchla back in the 70s was a guy named Douglas Leedy. His major album is Entropical Paradise which was done on a Buchla. He popped in and out of Tape Music Center, so there’s one degree of separation there. I bought my first synth from Serge Tcherepnin in Haight-Ashbury in 1979. For the first 10 years it was a Serge and a Roland Jupiter-8. By 1985, the Yamaha DX7 and the Korg M1 had come out, and everyone went digital. Sure, Stockhausen, Subotnick, lots of folks had taken the analogue synthesizer to great heights, but I felt there was more to learn. I was raising my hand and saying, “Wait! We haven’t found the edge of analog synthesis yet!” People looked at me like I was the village idiot. They took pity on me and gave me their analog gear, and by the mid-80’s, I had a wonderful collection to experiment with. Now we’ve come full circle and everyone’s getting back into analog. Eurorack is taking off. Morton Subotnick is having a great second act, touring all over the world with both older and newer work. People are starting to push the analog envelope further, and doing it through the lens of all the genres of music that have cropped up since 1980—hip hop, dub, trance, etc.
As a new generation of musicians discover the Buchla, what do you see as your role?
Don Buchla created a musical instrument that he said had no “preconceived ideas.” He wanted people to figure out how they wanted to interface with it. You see that with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Alessandro Cortini—they’re bringing their own voice to the palette. For my part, I’m obsessed with sound, with the “Buchla Paradigm.” Every day I explore with sound in the studio. Since I retired from the Shakespeare Festival, I’ve been making little videos, putting them online, sharing my discoveries and hoping people take them to places I never considered.
A friend of mine told me that her first boombox came with a CD of music by Paul Lansky, as a demonstration of the burgeoning potential of the CD format. I thought that was funny at the time, but now it strikes me that all electronic music is in a sense a kind of demonstration. How do you draw the line between the music you make, say, for the purpose of showing off the capabilities of the Buchla, to what is considered a song?
Well, for me, demos are demos. If I’m exploring sound, I’ll stumble onto something with one of these synthesizers, be it a Serge, a Buchla or a Hordijk, and I’ll think, “Oh that’s interesting,” and I’ll make a demo of it. Sometimes I’ll do a voiceover and say, “Here, let’s patch this together,” or, “Here’s what it does, these are the knobs you want to explore first, but feel free to take it further.” Sometimes the demo will just be the camera on my hands on the synthesizer, but I’m still exploring some specific aspect, and each aspect becomes another arrow in my compositional quiver. The word compose is Latin for “to put together.” When I compose, there’s definitely intent there. Sometimes the structure presents itself as you’re sculpting the sounds. I might say, “Well, what if I start here, and then go towards this.” I might change a few things on the way there, but the process creates the form.
I grew up performing acoustic music and composing for string quartets, small ensembles, and orchestras. Everything was written out. When I’d write a note, it would tell a musician what fingers to put down on their instrument, how loud to play it, etc. But when I started composing electronic music, I was composing from the perspective of the sound, not the musician. I was creating a sound that wasn’t, say, an oboe, or a clarinet. It might have some sonic gesture, some glitch or grit in it that’s not even possible on an acoustic instrument. Composing electronic music is a completely different ballgame because you’re creating at a granular level, making up the instruments as you go. A composer can use the twelve-tone system in a serial way or in a more harmonic, melodic, modular way, but it’s still just 12 notes. A synthesizer can get everything in-between, all the bizarre timbres and tone colors of your imagination.
This touches on something I saw recently in a documentary about Canadian composer Martin Bartlett. He spoke about the potential for electronic music to erase the distinction between composer and performer, presumably because the composition process can be done by way of patching in real time. Is this how you think about performing with a synthesizer—“composing” for an audience?
Absolutely. It goes all the way back to Stockhausen, the idea that a musician can actually “hold” sound, create sound from nothing. I create compositions that end up on CDs, cassettes, or LPs, and often the bulk of that comes from improvisation, and I might layer it, remix it, tweak it a lot. Other times, when I do a performance, let’s say for 30 minutes, I feel that I’m performing a composition, even though it is completely free improvisation. The Buchla Music Easel has all these beautiful colored sliders, switches, knobs. Sometimes before I start I’ll have a ten year old come up from the audience and move everything around. Then I turn the volume knob up, and start from there. I follow that sound to a composition, to an improvisation.
You did a project in 1997 where you composed a roughly one minute piece every day for a month, then released it to CD and the web. In the liner notes, you encourage the listener to “reprogram” the CD by listening out of sequence. Is this kind of interactive listening something you’ve explored further?
I don’t know that I’ve explored that since. This was the 90’s, so the idea was kind of ”make your own playlist.” In a way, it was an excuse to use every synthesizer in my studio, even the neglected ones. I woke up every morning and I had until 10 o’clock to finish the piece, and then I would put it online. For each synth, I had to re-learn or re-figure out what it was telling me, and go with it.
My first experience with electronic music was probably in the late 90s, early 2000’s. I remember going to noise shows, where the setup was almost always a solitary person on the floor surrounded by electronics that were being fiddled with. Do you think electronic music is prone to this kind of relationship, where a performer is in a sense in dialogue with themselves or their own “feedback loop,” or can it be more of a social process?
I think it depends a lot on the venue. I do Easel duets regularly with my colleague, Bruce Bayard. A few years ago, I got four performers together. That was a bit of an homage to the Electric Weasel Ensemble, which was Don Buchla, Allen Strange, Pat Strange, Steve Ruppenthal, and David Morse. Those five were actually the first to get Easels. When I was in Berlin in October I did a little talk and a solo set, and then afterwards there was a jam with six other synthesists. Almost every city now has a synth meet. LA has Modular on the Spot. I think they meet in those big drainage ditches that don’t have water in them.
We call that “the river.”
Yes! I hear they play at different outdoor spots all over LA. They’re mostly solo artists, but they have a community. I think the solo paradigm is equally valid. I’ve been plenty of places where there’s just one person on the floor surrounded by DIY stuff, foot pedals, doing their thing.
I’ve been reading about Terry Riley’s 1958 improvisations with Pauline Oliveros, about how the rule was that they wouldn’t speak before or during the session, only after. It’s interesting because my first exposure to minimalist music was in the context of these very tight, very contained performances and recordings. As I learn more, I’m finding out about the social history, connections to Stuart Brand, things like the Homebrew Computer Club, that history of California experimentation. These were also jam sessions.
You know, Don Buchla created speaker arrays and mixers for the Grateful Dead, for processing their sound.
Wow, really?
Yeah. And the other person doing that was John Meyer. His speakers are the gold standard these days. He was working with Don.
Do you think about the aesthetic experience a musician has with an instrument, especially one like the Music Easel or the Continuum? I don’t mean the look of performing with it, but the personal experience of the musician.
I think about timbre and wanting to, what I’d call, “follow the sound.” If I’m doing an improvisation or I’m composing notes on paper, there’s a continual feedback to the sounds that are happening. I try to guide or sculpt the sound into something new, or at least new to me, and the feedback keeps going. Sometimes I try to sculpt it in one way, and it goes in another, and I think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I come from a wind instrument background. I grew up playing trumpet, and I’ve studied shakuhachi for 30 years now. The gestures I make, have made my whole life, are connected to breath. If you really practice, you can hold long notes on the trumpet, but eventually the breath runs out. The oscillator on the Easel will keep going as long as there’s electricity. I just finished a piece that I sent off to the UK for a compilation. It’s full of long, washy, drone sounds, with harmonic timbres that go from very consonant or thin, to very dense and complex. Those shifts are probably not unlike a slow breath.
I’m noticing, especially on an album like Analog Horizonings, the influence of Indian classical music.
I was exposed a lot as a teenager to Indian music, ragas, and I personally played tamboor in some sessions, so it’s an influence for sure. I’ve done some meditation music too. My friend who plays sitar, Russ Appleyard, studied and toured in India for years. He and I also at one point in our development locked into didgeridoos. There were a few years there where that was just it. There were stories about aboriginal cultures that would play didgeridoo from sunset to sunrise. I remember we got about three hours once. It was mind-altering.
I’ve been listening to an excerpt of your extraordinarily beautiful tape from 1986 called I/Shi-Ho: Meditation Environments. Can you talk a little bit about this piece? Are all the sounds on this tape made with a synthesizer or are there vocal samples as well?
I think I was influenced a little bit by Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and things like that. I didn’t have much technology at that point. The samples are actually (laughs) either an 8-bit Ensoniq Mirage, or maybe a Korg Wavestation. Pretty primitive compared to today. Maybe a Roland Jupiter-8 made it on there for a drone or washy thing. I was probably using the first iteration of a software DAW called Cakewalk. Version 1! The title came from the I Ching.
I don’t know anything about making music, but I have accidentally built some sculptures that turned out to be musical. It strikes me that there’s a great many reasons to make your own musical instrument: achieving a different sound, actualizing a kind of philosophy or worldview, producing visual spectacle, or just for ergonomic reasons. Can you talk about the instruments that were made for Music and Poetry of the Kesh?
When it comes to instrument building, I was more of a dabbler. I made baroque flutes and trumpet mutes–that’s really a niche there–and renaissance recorders. That informed a part I wrote in Music and Poetry of the Kesh where I described Kesh instruments. Ursula Le Guin and I would bring instruments that we had “found,” in our imagination, from the Kesh culture. I would describe them, and explain how they were built and what sounds they made. Of course, as she was working on the book, I was working on the music–this was from 1983 to 1985. We didn’t have time to build these instruments and beta test them, so I did it all on a Roland Jupiter 8. Once the book was published, people actually started building these instruments, and they ended up sounding like what I had dreamed they would sound like! Since then, I haven’t built any instruments per se, but anything can become an instrument—found metal, found wood. These days, in the electronic world, it’s people with their Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. That’s beyond me.
Really?
I don’t have a lot of technical experience in that way. I know what a resistor and a capacitor do, but I couldn’t build anything from scratch. I’m a composer and performer fascinated with sound. I have a working knowledge, and I’ve soldered up synthesizer modules, but that doesn’t mean I know exactly what that resistor’s doing when I put it in there. People will cold call or email me with two pages of “Is that plus or minus five volts?” I read it all, and say “I’m sorry! Please contact my friend so-and-so.”
You’ve said you’re not interested in producing a traditional score where the timbre would be open to interpretation, but if that’s the case, how do you notate your music? Is there some other format or way of making a score that interests you?
Well, there are formats out there. I’m not categorically against scores for electronic music—
(The interview is interrupted because Barton finds a black widow spider.)
Those are serious. I was bitten once, it was horrible. I had a fever for a month.
I think I got it. Where were we? Oh, scores. A score for electronic music, and I’m being totally reductive here, is a graphic score. A score might say, “Start with this curvilinear gesture, play it for 30 seconds, then that’s followed by this series of plots,” etc. There’s a huge history of that from the 60s on, with some really amazing scores out there, but it presupposes you’ve got musicians who have worked in an improvisational way and are open, imaginative, and creative about how to interpret it. Sarah Belle Reid, who teaches at CalArts, started a score project called The Postcard Project (which was inspired, in part, by James Tenney’s Postal Pieces). She sent me a postcard of a graphic score, and I then interpreted it using the Music Easel and sent it back to her, along with a graphic score I made for her to interpret. She did this with lots of composers. That’s one way.
When I’m writing an acoustical score and I write middle C, I know how the flute player is going to finger it to get that note. I can add extended techniques to it, but it’s still going to sound like a C. On a synthesizer it’s a different story, especially with different setups. Let’s say I’ve got a EMS Synthi, you’ve got a Buchla, and my friend has a Hordijk, and somebody has some weird collection of Eurorack stuff. There’s no telling if everyone has the components to do the gesture I’m looking for. I did write a piece for four Music Easels, since the Easel is designed as a complete instrument. That’s something like, “Ok, we start with these knobs set at these marks, and we take two minutes to fade in these sounds, and then we’re gonna take forty five seconds to change the setting on the reverb, which is going to change the sounds dramatically, and then there might be points of free randomness for a minute, but we’re all gonna go back toward this next setting of the sliders and knobs.” In a way, it was as specific as when I used to write for acoustic instruments. But that’s only possible if you’re all working with the same instrument.
Can you tell me a little bit about your drawings? Do you see this as a parallel practice or does it inform your music?
It began as postcard art, about ten years ago, when my mentor and good friend was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We both love fountain pens and the way ink flows when writing or creating art, so we swapped postcards every day for at least three or four years. It began as a form of therapy. I don’t consider myself a visual artist, but I started on a journey. The good news is, he just turned 80, he’s in great shape, and still composing! The other aspect is my fascination with the work of Wassily Kandinsky. When I started, I hung up a big print of “Komposition 8.” I would just sit there for awhile and think about a dot. Where would the most interesting place for another dot be? I’d add a line, maybe a triangle. I think I was remixing “Komposition 8” in my own way. Kandinsky worked in charcoal, oils, acrylic, pastels, pen and ink. I started exploring different media. I did that every day for years, and I think I’m happy with some of what I did. (laughs) When I make music, I’m sculpting sound. When I make a drawing, I’m sculpting ink.
I think I read recently that the first Buchla design was a lamp, a rotating disc with holes in it, and a photoresistor. So from the very beginning the synthesizer had an “eye” in it, a connection to visual phenomena.
I think whether it’s dance, poetry, music, it’s all just sculpting energy. Of course, it can take a little while to get your technique together!
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Thanks to Todd Barton, Peter Harkawik, and RVNG Intl. for facilitating this interview.
Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.
For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by a certain thread of post-minimalist music that has taken the form away from its challenging, austere roots and more toward the melodic, etherial, and uplifting. Daniel Lentz, Mary Jane Leach, Paul Dresher, Elodie Lauten, and Andrew Poppy (whose Lost Jockey LP remains criminally out of circulation) have all made contributions in this direction. Wim Mertens is as responsible as anyone, publishing American Minimal Music, a text that helped introduce Europe to minimalism, in 1983. Perhaps my favorite though is Another Sunrise, a piece composed by Peter Garland for Aki Takahashi and Essential Music in 1995.
Another Sunrise continues a long intersection between Native American and minimalist music. Harry Partch and Moondog both constructed instruments inspired largely by those of indigenous peoples; the latter spent a summer in 1948 camped outside a Navajo reservation in New Mexico in a failed attempt to interest them in his music. Garland studied composition and ethnomusicology under Harold Budd and James Tenney at CalArts in the early 1970s, making extended stays in Mexico and eventually settling in Santa Fe in 1980, where he directed a performance ensemble. Sunrise benefits greatly from his long friendship with Aki Takahashi, a gifted and prolific avant-garde pianist who has collaborated with Tōru Takemitsu, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, and Carl Stone. She is joined by Judith Gordon on piano, and four percussionists, apparently the product of an arrangement previously set up for a Paul Bowles piece.
Another Sunrise is, from its first note, a showcase for the marimbula, an instrument of the Caribbean that shares a heritage with the African thumb piano. Its opening five bars form a simple theme that is the piece’s primary generative element. The titles of its short segments offer formal clues: mariachi, ballad, rumba, bolero, coda and finally, gospel. Vibraphone and marimba declare themselves halfway through “Ballad,” joined by dueling pianos. If it were not for the supreme beauty of the melody, Takahashi’s playing here would be almost violent, an urgent reminder that the piano is, after all, a percussive instrument. “Rumba” borrows only rattles and tempo from its namesake, followed by a quiet interlude in “Bolero.” Another Sunrise makes powerful use of its silent passages, and its circular, modal nature make for many moments when the piece feels it has concluded, only to continue in a thrilling steel drum crash. This is most true in the coda and final “Gospel Medley,” a deeply moving summation that calls to mind a congregation of enthralled worshippers. Part of my love of minimalist music is its ability to reveal itself upon repeated listenings, making it the ideal soundtrack for work that requires long stretches of sustained concentration, and this is certainly true here.
Sunrise is accompanied by two other Garland works, “Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage” (1977, recorded in 1997) and “I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last” (1993, recorded in 1995). “Dreaming” is a somber polyphonic work, beginning with a naked vocal harmony and slowly introducing an Indonesian angklung, marimba, and harpsichord. This marks Garland’s return to working with orchestral instruments after a period of abstinence apparently inspired by a brief friendship with Partch. “Simplest” was composed shortly after the death of John Cage in 1993, and is the collection’s most pared-down, most direct piece. It is broken into four segments that feel like a single supposition with divergent conclusions. Its final component, titled “I Found Them Like Seashells On The Beach (J. Cage)” is a passage of startling and profound quietude, and a fitting end, both for its subject, and this collection.
In recognition of today’s vernal equinox, I wanted to share a cult classic from the Hosono catalog, originally commissioned in 1983 as background music by Muji shortly after the opening of their first storefront in Tokyo. The tape was packaged in a box set with an 80 page booklet, including photographs, an interview with Hosono, haiku, and work by Nakazawa Shinichi (who I assume made the cover art, though I’m not sure). The story goes that Muji only used one of the tracks for in-store purposes (presumably “Muji Original BGM,” previewed below), and while the tape is still hyper-rare, since then the music has circulated widely online, most famously on YouTube, and has been presented with several different track listings, some including two different versions of “Talking.” I’m including all four tracks here, though the original tape ostensibly only included “Talking” and “Growth.”
Sonically, these tracks are exemplary of Hosono’s brilliance with motif, minimalism, and movement. Those who are familiar with his records Mercuric DanceandParadise Viewmight find Watering A Flower to sit squarely between the two, both in terms of textural density and mood. The songs are sparse, to put it lightly–bare bones, really. They’re not as neutral, or even chipper, as one might expect for storefront use: they willfully stray into eerie, dissociative territory, suggesting hypnosis and foggy, dreamlike states. Dreamlike in the more honest sense of the word, as I think dreams are often more illogical, dry, and bizarre than the word “dreamlike” gives them credit for. Though the whole tape is beatless–a sacrilegious suggestion for the 2018 retail environment–“Talking” is marked by the insistent chiming of a metronomic tone; whereas in “Growth” the chime is slowed down and flooded with reverb, suggesting underwater sonar. Hosono doesn’t hesitate to lean into dissonance and atonality, and it’s plenty disorienting.
Still, by the time the appropriately drily titled “Muji Original BGM” arrives, Hosono has reminded us that he’s very good at making things that are very beautiful. For sixteen minutes the song cycles, mantric, through small variations on two different phrases, one much moreso than the other, and it’s weightless, unhurried, deeply affecting, and perfect. I’d love to go shopping for minimalist home goods in this world, though I’m not sure that I’d buy anything. Enjoy, and happy spring!
Sublime collaboration between Silvio Linardi (who’s collaborated with David Sylvian, Hector Zazou, Roger Eno, and others) and Pier Luigi Andreoni (whom you may know from The Doubling Riders). Ricardo Sinigaglia makes a few appearances too, first on piano and then on an Akai S 900. This was their only release as Andreolina.
Sprawling, weightless instrumentals that never stay soporific for too long. You can hear Andreoni’s classical training in much of this, and not just because of how much oboe there is, but structurally too. The name of the album comes from an unfinished piece of William Blake prose, and some of the song titles are Blake references as well–so while it might be power of suggestion, there seem to be tinges of romanticism dotted throughout, whereas other moments veer off into jazz. Lots to love here for Elicoide fans.
As an aside, this was released on ADN, the same label responsible for Tasaday’s L’Eterna Risata and the aforementioned Sinigaglia record. Depending on who you ask, ADN can stand for A Dull Note, L’amore del Nipote, or Agnostic Dumplings Nursery.
Sometimes the music tells its own story. I bought Yumiko Morioka’s Resonance last year in Tokyo (on the recommendation of someone who knew I’d been devouring records by the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Toshifumi Hinata, Haruomi Hosono and many other names who’ll be familiar to readers of this blog) knowing nothing more than what my ears were telling me – that this was a very beautiful slow-burning piano album; Satie-esque ripples through a tranquil sea of crystalline digital reverb, equal parts Sakamoto, Budd, and the Eno brothers. I fell in love with this album on its own terms, with no real sense of how it fits into the wider story of 1980s Japanese ambient music.
As someone who can neither speak nor read Japanese, piecing together the background of this album is its own adventure, relying a lot on shaky auto-translate services and reasonably intelligent guesswork. Yumiko Morioka was born in 1956, and studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She spent much of the last three decades in the United States; Resonance is her only solo release, although she later released a collaborative album with Bill Nelson called Culturemix in 1995. Under the pen name of Satoshi Miyashita, she wrote a number of hit songs for idol acts throughout the 80’s including Toshihiko Tahara and other performers from the notorious Johnny & Associates stable.
Dig further into Resonance’s credits and associates and some familiar names start to appear. The album was produced by new age keyboardist Akira Ito, formerly of the Far East Family Band, and was the only LP released on Ito’s Green & Water label that wasn’t one of his own efforts. Morioka herself occasionally played piano for Miharu Koshi, and receives a “special thanks” credit in the liner notes to Hosono’s Omni Sight Seeing.
So it’s tempting to view Resonance primarily as another link in the dense latticework of interconnecting artists and albums from 70s and 80s Japan that enthusiastic Western listeners are only now starting to piece together through blog posts, YouTube algorithms and curatorial mixes. Another piece in the puzzle. But you really don’t need to know any of this stuff. Resonance really is nothing more than a very beautiful slow-burning piano album, one whose exploratory pieces gently unfold in a way that slows time and, in the best Eno tradition, pleasantly colour any environment in which they’re heard. It’s an honest, open record, and one that I hope you will love as much as I do.
Really sparse and beautiful ambient minimalism made to score the dance theatre piece Alejo performed by the Pappa Tarahumara dance company (which is still active today, and apparently once performed at Reed College). Ebbs and flows of activity, with busier synthetic tracks like “Straight Line Floating In The Sky” and “Mistral,” gauzy pastoral moments suggestive of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green (“Theme of Alejo”), and piano meandering that reminds me of Toshifumi Hinata’s jazzier piano moments–but all done a little bit more roughly, this being a self-released cassette. Prismatic and ringing. Perfect picnic soundtrack.
(download link removed as reissue is forthcoming!)
My newest mix for NTS Radio is a two hour tribute to Joanna Brouk, who passed away this month at 68. Considered one of the early founders of New Age, Brouk never referred to herself as a composer, but rather insisted that she was a vessel for the music that flowed through her. Her work sat somewhere in between new age, drone, minimalism, and classically inclined ambient, with a curiosity and a roughness reminiscent of pioneering early electronic music. You can buy her excellent compilation released last year by Numero Group here. There’s also a great interview with her here in which she talks about her early processes and her work in sound healing.
She often said that it was the space between the notes in which interesting things start to happen, and that music has to slow down in order to get there. I put this mix together of things that, to me, are similarly interested in space and silence. Some of these songs were written by her contemporaries; others are just things that I hope she might have liked. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version here. Goodnight, Joanna, and safe journey.
Tracklist:
1. Joanna Brouk – Healing Music (excerpt)
2. Francesco Messina – Prati Bagnati Del Monte Alalogo (excerpt)
3. Kudsi Erguner & Xavier Bellenger – Apu-Caylioch / Le Seigneur Des Étoiles
4. Kevin Braheny – Lullaby for the Hearts of Space (excerpt)
5. John Clark – The Abhà Kingdom (excerpt)
6. Masahiro Sugaya – 水-(1)
7. Craig Kupka – Clouds II (excerpt)
8. Iasos – The Winds of Olympus
9. Daniel – Quartz Crystal Bells (Side A) (excerpt)
A favorite. Not purely an ambient record, as there are a handful of more jittery, percussive tracks in the second half, but a good deal of this is, for me, ideal music to work to. Ringing, jewel-like washes of synth, but with a pronounced weight that similarly intentioned records seem to be lacking. The navy blue cover feels very apt–there’s something angular and a bit severe about this that I love. Recontextualized elements of traditional Japanese drumming throughout. This was commissioned for a contemporary ballet piece released on video in 1984 by Bandai, in collaboration with Tadayoshi Arai; and “each track was inspired by a planet or the moon, except last one.” Enjoy!
Arguably an apotheosis of the long and fruitful 80s Japanese and British musical cross-pollination. Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri were both founding members of Japan, alongside David Sylvian, and the band toured with Masami Tsuchiya of Ippu-Do and Yukihiro Takahashi of YMO. Jansen and Barbieri both contributed to Ippu-Do’s Night Mirage, and Tsuchiya went on to release his mini-album Alone the same year as Worlds In A Small Room. At this point it becomes unclear who is influencing whom and in what order, as the opening track of Worlds immediately calls to mind the signature staggered synth swells of Alone. Later in the record, “Moving In Circles” is a direct, if gritty nod to the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, so it’s unsurprising that Japan bandmate David Sylvian worked closely with Sakamoto and the two even riffed on the Mr. Lawrence theme together, with Jansen contributing drums, and Seigen Ono mixing. I suspect Ono might have had some indirect influence on Worlds‘s stark prettiness. Here on the Japanese release of Worlds, “Moving In Circles” gets a bonus reprise, but this time with vocals from Jansen, sounding like a less theatrical Sylvian–a reminder that the two are brothers as well as bandmates. “Mission” sounds for all the world like a murky YMO demo circa BGM (a very good thing). The following year, Jansen and YMO’s Takahashi went on to collaborate on the excellent Stay Close. There are probably dozens more inlets of inspiration and collaboration evidenced on this record–this is just scratching the surface. (*closes out of 25 tabs*)
Perhaps more importantly, this is a stunning record that only opens up with increasing generosity upon further listens. “Breaking The Silence” and the later “The Way The Light Falls” are unrepentantly beautiful but without any wasted gestures. There are still surprises, though–a few rays of koto on “Distance Fires,” a synthetic organ, a sudden swerve towards pop, towards classical. Sparse, mysterious, and nostalgic, this is a movie score waiting for a movie that’s good enough.
As a footnote to all of this, there’s a gorgeous collection of Jansen’s archival photos on his website, including members of Japan, Sakamoto, Tsuchiya, Yukihiro Takahashi, and many others (notably this one of Sakamoto in the studio during an Akiko Yano recording session.)
