Only one piece-Ayuo Takahashi’s “Nagareru”-includes singing.
Some are built on sustained chords while others rely on continually moving arpeggios. Some tracks are arrhythmic while others are rigidly fixed to a repetitive beat. There are synth washes aplenty, but there are organic sounds in there, too, often in the form of pianos and bells. The assorted tracks, while generally placid and nonspecific, are anything but uniform. Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 by Kankyō Ongaku The only real criticism one can have of Kankyō Ongaku is that its three vinyl discs (two CDs) are not enough, because once this music starts to wash over you, it precipitates a mind-state you don’t really want to snap out of. The director and selector of this compilation is Portland musician and musicologist Spencer Doran, who records and performs with Visible Cloaks and whose scholarship of the genre is evident in not only his choices but in the set's comprehensive liner notes (co-written with Yosuke Kitazawa). This all is a very long way of saying Light in the Attic knows what it’s doing in terms of definitive surveys of foundational movements in Japanese music, and in terms of presenting them to western listeners who might be more familiar with the music these works influenced that with the works themselves.
The label has also released direct reissues of albums by influential Japanese musician Haruomi Hosono, whose solo work is represented on this new Kankyō Ongaku by the comp’s lengthy, achingly gorgeous closing track “Original BGM,” which was originally composed as background music for the MUJI department store.
MICROCOSM JAPANESE BAND SERIES
Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 is the third in Light in the Attic’s series of ambient- and new age-adjacent multidisc compilations, following I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990 and The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986-although it perhaps more directly fits in with the label’s ongoing Japan Archival Series, which has included Even a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973 and the announced but not yet released Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1975-1985 Light in the Attic founder Matt Sullivan says there will eventually be nearly two dozen releases in the series. A stunning compilation of this ambient and installation music from the ’80s has just been released by Seattle reissue label Light in the Attic, and it’s the perfect point of entry into a fertile music scene that feels shockingly relevant in 2019 America. The result was a marvelous substrain of so-called “ambient” music-although that shorthand term scarcely scratches the surface-that united disparate sensations, simultaneously evoking Japan’s growing, artificially illuminated cityscapes and the archipelago’s wild fields, coasts, and mountains. Jean-Claude VorgeackIn 1980s Japan, during a boom that transformed the global economy, Japanese musicians refined a strain of abstract music that was a direct response to the country’s increasing urbanization and a means of reconnecting with the nation’s spiritual roots, which were very much tied into nature.
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