When we last left off discovering the “comfiest music” on earth (all self-appointed, of course), Gontiti was gently surprising me both at a Japanese hair salon and, later on, at home discovering their little known, early experimental work. Today, I go even further back, to their beginnings as a duo ever more in tune with the edges of the avant garde Tokyo art scene. Joining them in Tramart Sound Collection Vol. 1: Music As Interior is a name no amount of my own research could pull up any info about: Kazumasa Kawashima. A gorgeous dual cassette compilation, first off is Gontiti cycling through various musical snippets and ideas, framed by much clearer points to their influences. The second cassette is Kazumasa Kawashima joining the Satoshi Ashikawa school of ambient music by creating a whole cassette of still-moving, minimal music, heavy on the minimal part of the equation.
Tramart Sound Collection Vol. 1: Music As Interior was originally released by a Tokyo art shop run by designer Mic Itaya, set in the (once famous) Roppongi WAVE music/video store building. TRAM ART, as the shop was known then, would put out an independent magazine and run a cassette compilation label (TRA PROJECT) that would attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Tokyo’s underground art scene. TRA / TIGER would allow him to curate some of the best design he had, all the while promoting various Tokyo underground musicians, including his own band Zazou. Before this release, early compilations from TRA MART would feature the work of Toshio Nakanishi, Cioccolata, Mute Beat, Yann Tomita, and Hajime Tachibana, all little-known upstarts trying to make a name for themselves before their careers would take off. For example, with Toshio, on a comp like New Artist Catalogue Winter Issue 1982, TRA MART consumers would get surprising, early hints of his upcoming Melon Group and others would be privy to some of the earliest known Japanese Hip-Hop.
Mic Itaya, didn’t get this idea solely himself. In 1982, he got wind of an Osaka guitar duo that a friend simply told him they must go out and see. In their embryonic phase, Masahiko “Gonzalez” Mikami and “Masahide” Titi Matsumura could be found on stage playing their highly technical, kaleidoscopic mix of Brazilian pop, impressionist classical music, and minimal-leaning compositions. A chance meeting with Mic spurred the three to begin the cassette part of the art shop in the hope of this duo being able to contribute something for the zine itself. Busy recording their first album, 1983’s Another Mood, at first the duo let other musicians contribute selections to early releases.
Finally, in 1983, New Artist Catalogue 1983 gave everyone a chance to hear on tape, Gonzalez Mikami and Titi Matsumura’s first music on tape. Joining a jaw-dropping, curated selection of music by Cioccolata, Yoshiaki Ochi, Toshio Nakanishi, Mute Beat, Phonogenix, and Satoshi Ashikawa, was Gonzalez Mikami and Titi Matsumura’s “Marcel De Saemo”. Perfectly bookending the virginal environmental music of Satoshi Ashikawa, “Marcel De Saemo” was a gorgeous, but quite brief snippet of lightly-ambient, latin-tinged, instrumental music — a seedling of what the Gontiti sound would come to be, a presentation of “ambient” music of a different flavor. Now official, though, Gonzalez Mikami and Titi Matsumura were a band to be taken notice of. And now they had music on tape.
Tramart Sound Collection Vol. 1: Music As Interior, creatively, takes the gambit even further. Spaced out over two cassettes would be the ideas that bookended New Artist Catalogue 1983. Moved by Satie’s ideas of furniture music, and taken one step further by Satoshi’s more contemporary idea of interior music, both Gontiti and Kazumasa Kawashima would present in long form how far they could explore their own idea of minimal music.
Gonzalez Mikami and Titi Matsumura conceived their cassette as music to go to sleep by. Digging deep into their own influential corners, Gontiti contributed all sorts of embryonic tunes that recall the music of Satie, the experimentalism of Gilberto and Jobim, while holding the movement of more contemporary musicians like Erasmo Carlos or The Durutti Column. A far cry from what would be their debut, Another Mood, what’s surprising about their 45-minute set of music is how experimental it is.
Gontiti’s “Music For Sleep” and “Music For Deeper Sleep” shares the creativity of 1984’s 脇役であるとも知らずに. In this case, forcing themselves to fill out the whole tape and atmosphere merely with their guitars, they hold back and treat us to all sorts of sonic space and longing melodies that feel like our time before sleep or during some saudade/bittersweet time. “Music For Sleep” the more deliberately engaging of the two tracks, cycles through Gontiti’s influences (impressionist, jazz pop, samba, MPB, bossa nova, American folk, and minimalism). In that unhurried, quite melancholic track, various moods and styles vie for your considerate attention. Perfect for listening to on a brisk spring day, or on a sunny, peaceful summer day, the guitar interplay between Gonzalez Mikami and Titi Matsumura is a pleasure to behold. Never flashy, always tasteful, as pining as it gets, it settles down to a wonderful state where you can really picture yourself napping off to it, if only you could stop yourself from waiting for the next plaintive nostalgic vignette to draw your attention. Joined by saxophonist Miura Toyoshi, they send you off to dreamland ending this song by sneaking into it a reimagining of Erasmo Carlos’ “Minha Gente” in the most tender way possible.
“Music For Deeper Sleep” walks the best line of the whole set. Never going above a certain tempo, it quite literally can soundtrack your deepest sleep. On this track, the duo settles on lower octave. On this track, they settle for even less notes and movement. It’s what makes the track as equally as deep, emotionally, speaking.
For me, it reminds me of João Gilberto‘s 1973 self-titled masterpiece. A perfect distillitation of the sonority one can produce when playing a music not from technique but out of spirit and inner tempo. As warm and spacious sounding as the prior track, the only difference now comes from the fusion of all the ideas Gontiti had into their own, mindful rumination of it. Deeply navel-gazing and self-aware, “Music For Deeper Sleep” lets various smooth beginnings literally echo on for a longer while and smoothens some rough interjections by building on where they land. If anything matches the cover designed Mic Itaya it’s this track — all flotsam becoming floating objects in a dream that doesn’t quite end.
Ending this release, though, is a fascinating tome of sound process design by Kazumasa Kawashima. The second cassette runs for another 45 minutes and is dedicated to one track: “Harmony 1”. Using what sounds like three synthetic tones, Kazumasa Kawashima plays those three notes, one after the other, in various ways, over long pauses of ambient noise, in a way that perfectly works as a furthering of Satoshi Ashikawa’s ideas. This could have been meant as music for a sound installation or as music to simply leave on as BGM to other things. Here, “Harmony 1” works as a piece that draws out all the music behind the space found in Gontiti’s music.
A rare 90 minutes of music, with purpose of mind, which is hard to come by this day, still has something meaningful to add. For me, now, it’s starting to really cement how Gontiti rarely lost sight of the power in their calm music. On certain days, you really do need music (much like this) as your interior.
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Domo arigato 😉