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.
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.
A rare example of a Japanese jazz-fusion record that’s aged well. Kimiko Kasai is a jazz chanteuse and songwriter extraordinaire who’s worked with the likes of Stan Getz, Oliver Nelson, and Herbie Hancock (this record is killer if you’re into that sort of thing). Unlike a lot of Tokyo Special‘s contemporaries, the record isn’t front-loaded with single-worthy tracks but instead burns slowly and evenly, from its unhurried but brutally hooky start (“バイブレイション [Love Celebration],” written by Tatsuro Yamashita) to its rolling piano-jam finish (“待ってて [Laidback Mad Or Mellow],” written by Akiko Yano).
Kimiko’s vocals are terrific here, sometimes breathy and pillowy and elsewhere powerful and with admirable range. Even the obligatory slow jams are tastefully produced and never veer into cloying territory–I love “木もれ陽 (Sequoia Forest)” for its heady, misty backing harmonies, judicious use of chimes, and woodblocks that mimic birds and insects. Excitingly, you can hear the pre-city pop and AOR influences taking shape. If you don’t like smooth jazz fusion, I can’t help you. If you do, please step inside.
Richard Tinti travelled to Borneo and recorded the sound of the forest. When Ariel Kalma listened to it, he could hear his melodies sung by the birds, even sometimes in the very keys he uses… Natural harmony and inspiration seems to flow from the same spring. Thus began the studio work: to tune, record, mix the different element together; to the animals and atmosphere of the jungle, answered generators, flutes, saxophones, bird-calls, synthesizers, organs. Some surprises also occurred, like this fly coming down to the mic at the end of “Planet-Air” …
Mixed at the Groupe of Research in Music (GRM), a department of French National Audiovisual Institute (INA).”
Deep, densely psychedelic synth experiments. At times it’s difficult to distinguish between insects and electronics, and difficult to tell whether the natural cadence of bird song has been looped to sync with synthetic rhythms or vice versa. Big harmonium, reverb-soaked flute, circular breathing saxophone, long delays, drum machines, flanged keyboards, and plenty of synth, alongside birds, forest sounds, and war drums. Mostly voiceless, with the exception of the stark and heavy “Osmose Chant.” Clever play with space and distance, with the music sometimes pulling back into the distance in a way that allows room tone (or even unintended noises, such as the aforementioned fly on the mic, which makes several appearances) to become a kind of third musical actor. The whole thing feels like a very well-executed joke about what “ambient music” is. Try it with good speakers, if you can.
Tracks 1-6 originally comprised Disc A of the 1978 double LP split with Ariel Kalma and Richard Tinti, with the second disc comprised of Tinti’s tracks (if anyone has these and would be willing to share, I’d love to hear them). Disc A was later rereleased in 2006 with two additional unreleased tracks that were recorded at the same time, credited as just to Ariel Kalma. While it’s just these Disc A tracks that I’m sharing today, given that these were made in collaboration with Tinti and with the aid of his field recordings (recorded on a Nagra recorder), I’m using the original credits. (I’m particularly fond of the closing unreleased track, “Orguitar Soir,” which is one of the more mellow moments in the collection: just gentle guitar plucking and a keyboard drone tucked into forest sounds.)
Edit: At the time of originally sharing this post, I was unaware that John Martyn had a history of perpetrating domestic abuse. I recognize the implications of embracing his work in light of that, and will do my best in the future to be more thorough in my research on the artists I write about!
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Piece By Piece is not for everyone. But what makes it such an exemplary slice of sophisti-pop, in my opinion, is that every time John Martyn toes the aesthetic line (is this too much saxophone? does this sound like late night lonely hearts suburban radio? are these lyrics actually just bad?), he redeems himself tenfold with startlingly gorgeous instrumentation and perfectly plump, high-gloss production. It continues to surprise after repeat listens, and is extra generous in headphones.
Backing up, though–for the unfamiliar, John Martyn was a British musician and songwriter who initially came up as a precocious folk scene giant but, as is well-evidenced here, branched out into much more exploratory territory. His body of work is as big as it is diverse, so much so that I still haven’t really wrapped my head around it. It’s been suggested that it was this very proclivity towards experimentation that kept him just shy of the mainstream success that he clearly deserved. He sadly passed away in 2009. He was a truly brilliant guitarist, he loved fretless bass, and his inimitable voice could turn from wistful sweet to inhuman growling on a dime.
While Piece By Piece might be an odd place to jump into his very rewarding discography, I think it’s appropriate in its own way. “Angeline,” for example, is exemplary of Martyn’s particular breed of strangeness: at first it seems like a Toyota dad ballad, but its repeating out-of-sync broken drum sample acts as a reminder that there’s got to be more, and sure enough, the “chorus”–which isn’t really a chorus at all–breaks open so pleasingly into gorgeous washes of reverb in which the vocals disappear into dissonant synth and vice versa. Oh, and for the fretless bass die-hards, it’s all over the record in spades. A deep purple and navy blue world of a record that feels so good to live in for 41 minutes: moody, wickedly smart sophisti-pop, with more and more to say for itself at every turn. Ideal night-time driving music.
The first of three records by Paraíba-born poet, percussionist, and composer Fernando Falcão, recorded in Paris in 1979 and released independently two years later. I realize that I’m a broken record, but this one is truly uncategorizable–and while that word can frequently connote records that are too challenging to be fully enjoyable, too ambitious for their own good, or just plain incoherent, Memória Das Águas is an utter pleasure from beginning to end.
“What?” you will think to yourself when you listen to it, which you should. “Who is this guy? Had he been quietly making music for decades under a pseudonym before releasing this? How else does something this orchestral in scope spring out fully formed on the first try? Why does he share a name with a Northeastern municipality?” you will ask after you’ve Googled him. “How’s his poetry? Is this a hoax? When is this getting reissued?” These are all questions I also have, which is to say, I’m sorry, I have no answers. All I have for context is that Fernando Falcão makes an appearance on the very good Outro Tempo compilation, which I suspect is how I landed here in the first place, but I’m not sure, as this record has been sitting in my “things to listen to” folder for months.
Memória Das Águas is a trip, moving seamlessly between swathes of avant murk, African polyrhythms, cinematic ambient flecked with field recordings, exuberant Brazilian jazz, maybe some Balinese Kecak influence, and a stripped down percussive number that, even in 2018, still sounds like the future. (I’ll say it again: 1979.) Instrumentally, that means cabasa, tumba, pandeiro, ganzá, contrabass, horn, flute, piccolo, piano, sax, timpani, violin, jug, and several different vocal ensembles. Functionally, it means this isn’t background music. Sometimes it feels like Geinoh Yamashirogumi; at others, it brings to mind the outside-of-time alien quality of Nuno Canavarro–and it is very much unlike either of those things. Try it–if you’re here, you’ll probably love it.
Wow! This one came out of left field for me and has quickly become a precious favorite, serving as a reminder of why music hunting is exciting in the first place: as finding unknown and wonderful full-lengths becomes less and less frequent, finding a record that instantly feels like home becomes all the more rewarding.
Though I often presuppose these posts by mentioning that there’s little available information about the artist, this one feels unusual in its total lack of context. Though they released two of their LPs on the German label Jupiter Records, a major hub for disco singles, none of the names associated with the project have led me to any names that I recognize, and I can’t really figure out who their peers were. Still, the first thing that comes to mind is the subdued lo-fi post-punk of Young Marble Giants (a very good sign), complete with coy vocals that, in spite of their shy hushed deliveries, are anything but naïve. But there’s a flattened minimal synth aspect here, that kind of lizardy quality, that suggests minimal wave favorites like Carol and Solid Space, or even the dark drum machine slink of Lena Platonos. There’s also a playfulness, those unexpected flirty details, that make me think of Leda (another excellent record that I hope hasn’t gotten lost in the archives).
But there’s plenty that defines Art as entirely its own, perhaps most notably its use of saxophone. Opener “The Way It Is” starts out with thirty seconds of free jazz sax riffing, echoed again later in the song in a remarkable use of sonic space, moving from a far echo to a dry forefront only to disappear into a puff of reverb. Brass shows up unexpectedly all over the record, always tasteful and always effective. Combined with gorgeous vocal treatment and sharp, restrained songwriting, this is a deeply sophisticated record. Though I haven’t yet spent enough time with Luna Set’s other two full-lengths, this is by far my favorite of the three, striking an ideal balance between minimalism and playful textural interest.
Note that there’s one noticeable glitch in the opening track–this is still the best quality rip I can find, but I’d be thrilled if anyone can share a cleaner version!
A classic. While Hosono needs no introduction around here, I’m realizing that Tatsuro Yamashita has perhaps not been given enough air time. For the unfamiliar, Yamashita is iconic in his own right, not just because of his classic Japanese Christmas favorite “Christmas Eve” or his enormous output but also because of his signature early-80’s take on a wall-of-sound expansiveness crossed with a deep love for the Beach Boys, relentlessly clever songwriting, and of course, mirror-polished synth programming. Shigeru Suzuki is perhaps best known for his work with Happy End and Tin Pan Alley, and is also a wildly prolific session musician, who’s contributed to over 588 recordings as of 2006.
Which brings us to Pacific, for which each track was composed by one of the above three. It also includes plenty of of contributions from–you guessed it–Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. Though YMO’s self-titled debut was also released in 1978, from what I understand Pacific came first, and feels very akin to much of the exotica and fusion that Hosono had already been fixated on across several projects. Still, Pacific is clearly the product of a handful of masterminds having fun together: its unabashed tropical nostalgia acts as a jumping off point for flitting between genres (lounge, funk, disco, rhumba, smooth jazz, Latin fusion, synth pop), all delivered in full-color with jaunty, winking songwriting.
Even with vaporwave and its kitsch-scraping genre contemporaries behind us, Pacific holds up as well as ever. It’s only in closer “Cosmic Surfin'” that we get a taste of the more hard-edged, crunchy electro that became YMO’s signature sound, and fittingly, a different version of the song went on to appear on YMO’s debut the same year. I highly recommend listening to this as much as possible before fall rolls around.
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!)
Originally comprised of four sisters from Bahia (Cybele, Cylene, Cynara, and Cyva; their real names), Quarteto em Cy has been enormously prolific and has also undergone many lineup changes over the years. I’ve been unsure which record of theirs to begin with since this blog started, so I’ve decided to start at the beginning and share their debut (and also their first of maybe five self-titled records), from what Brazilian music snobs consider to be their golden period (although they weren’t signed to the legendary Elenco label until 1966).
Swooning vocal harmonies delivered with expressive precision and set over meandering jazz and bossa textures. No reason not to be listening to this today.
