For fans of: Ambient Bliss / Japanese underground archives
What we Say: Now is a great time for fans of, and those just now discovering, the bounty of experimental and ambient music that issues from Japan in the late 1970s to earliest 1990s. Labels like Palto Flats, WeWantSounds, Empire of Signs, and WRWTFWW have unearthed some rare and much sought-after gems. Most notably among them, Yasuaki Shimizu's "Kakashi", Hiroshi Yoshimura's "Music for Nine Postcards", Midori Takada's lost minimalist masterpiece, "Through the Looking Glass", and now their first foray into ambient abstraction, "Danzindan-Pojidon" by Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita as Inoyama Land. Produced by studio wizard Haruomi Hosono, this wonderful gem of an album maps out an ambient territory between electronic minimalist composition, folkic world music touches, and the kind of performance and installations scores the duo would become known for throughout the 80s and 90s.
Further Listening: Also in this vein, in 2017 Light in the Attic released their document of "The Hidden History of Japan’s Folk-Rock Boom", as the first volume of the Japan Archive. The second and third volumes arrived last spring and summer with a sublime assembly of Japanese interior music on, "Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990", and the rarefied city pop sound was collected together on the "Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1975-1985". For those who couldn't get enough of beachside clubs and urban nightlife evoked by city pop's urban smoothness, expect a second volume of Pacific Breeze later this May.
In the excellent liner notes to Kankyo Ongaku, Visible Claoks' Spencer Doran rightly sites that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, John Cage and their 20th century contemporaries being taught in university courses attended by these then-young electronic pioneers. By bridging modernist and postmodern modes of composition with the then-concurrent forays into "musical furnishings" supplied by Brian Eno, their ideas about background, modes of attention, functionality, and the abstracting of authorship came to the fore. Many of these albums have been exceedingly hard to find for decades, so count yourself lucky that Light in the Attic's assembly of "Lullabies for Air Conditioners: The Corporate Bliss of Japanese Ambient", has arrived now when it has. It's a great time to be listening. - (JP)