Can I say something? I’m beginning to empathize more with the creative mindset of one Henry Kawahara than with one of Hiroshi Yoshimura. I say this not to inflame any passions but because I’m appreciating how he comes to terms with creating his kind of music. Far from the studied, mannered, ambient, Japanese kankyo ongaku, favored in popular music compilations, on Bamboo Garden we hear something closer to the everlasting sound design that’s reached brainwaves for millennia irregardless of one’s technological progress or know-how. It’s something, I think, was always a goal of Henry’s — to create a virtual, auditory illusion of the subtropics.
Henry is a hard man to pinpoint. Nowadays, it seems he is a restaurateur, small-time hotel entrepreneur, organic farmer and yogurt-maker, food blogger, yogi, vedantic practitioner, digital graphic artist… and those are the things I could make out from some archived internet history. Sadly, now, it appears that Henry is battling Adult Still’s disease forcing him to focus almost entirely on the professional realm and leave the musical one aside. It’s the musical one that’s deeply interesting.
Far removed from his homeland of Japan, Henry now calls the country of Cambodia his adopted home. Driven to explore Javanese music, the music of the subtropics, and to isolate himself (in a way) from the fast-driven world of Japanese commerce, it’s in places like Yogyakarta or Siem Reap where he’d strap his mobile computer studio down and create his own fascinating idea of post-modern shamanic healing music. It’s only with time that he let this musically, creative side go in favor of other ventures.
It all began in 1992, unable to find a record label that would release his ambient tribal-esque music, Henry took it upon himself to create his own label he’d dub “Green Energy”. Under his own imprint he released albums that span his idea of joining the imagined world with the sampled one. Using field recordings, real and electronic percussion, and computer software he’d create albums that tweaked surround sound effects to sort of create the ambience or atmosphere of the “dream music” he imagined in those far flung sub-tropical places he’d venture too.
Purposely muggy, multi-layered, spiritual, dreamy, and at times, truly dense, Henry’s music appears far removed from any foundation in “learned” inspiration that other artists were drawing at that time — if one speaks of it taken from Eno, Stockhausen, etc. Henry’s music always sounds like it belongs transmitted through the jungle. Austerity isn’t here, purposefully. If you could find peace in the heat of such place, Henry’s music sounds like that atmospheric music that would perfectly accentuate such an environment.
Henry, for all intents and purposes is an ambient artist who seems to dabble a lot into the shamanistic realm of music. It’s important not to divorce oneself from this — Henry’s music is maximalist. Now, of the two I’ve managed to listen to, Bamboo Garden takes you closest to the unvarnished heart of what I think is his musical center.
I’ve heard two of his album’s that are still available somewhere on the web. Some albums that I haven’t listened to speak of music for “out of body” experiences, others of recreating the feeling of an LSD trip or a sexual orgasm, then there are those that speak of freeing mind controls, or tapping into prehistoric music for magical realizations.
If Steve Roach could create the ambient equivalent of “desert music”, surely Henry’s work makes it case for it’s equivalent in the realm of the “jungle”. Floating wooden and metallic percussion, real and imagined, form the backbone of his work here. Interspersed throughout are vivid sound recordings of ethnic chant, street life, and simpatico vocalese either self-performed/recorded.
You wouldn’t think of finding peace in the densely layered, panoramic, sonic maelstrom Henry performs, but it’s there in Bamboo Garden. Songs like the opener, “Bamboo Christmas”, “Minami-Kaze 1+2” work their charms via tantric repetition. Songs like “Boxing Day”, “Children At The Museum”, “Die! Ho!! (Forever ASIA)”, and “I Know…” shift through polyrhythms in such a way that an actual green scene forms in your headspace with infinite callbacks via ages-old microtonal melodicism.
Although, I wish I had more actual information to share about Mr. Kawahara himself, it’s kind of nice to still discover mysteries like this one, ones that make one wonder where the line between electronics and organics begin and whether we truly can appreciate these other forms of “environmental music”.