Sometimes I think various music reviewers and blogs bandy the term “floating” a bit too loosely with music. What some might think of as a floater seems to be a bit lightweight to me. However, in the case of Hiroki Komazawa’s Feliz, no other term comes closest to describing it. Here there is just one man on his pedal steel guitar, multi-tracking his connection to the powerful redemption force found within music itself and it sure does sound like it floats.
Hiroki, perhaps unbeknownst to you, has provided some of the most heavenly-sounding background guitar harmonies you’ve heard before. Born and raised in Tokyo, as a child he’d borrow his father’s guitar and try to emulate the sound of the Beatles, slowly teaching himself how to play the darn thing.
By the time Hiroki was nearing his ‘20s he began to take his first step into the music industry. A short stint with Japanese country and western group Prairie Riders allowed him to stumble upon the instrument that would change his career. Unable to slot in as another guitarist in the band, the band would ask him to take up the pedal steel guitar instead (managing to scrounge one up for him to borrow).
Figuring out the intricacies of the countryfied contraption and dedicating himself thoroughly to tackling its technique afforded Hiroki an entry way into Japan’s burgeoning Western-influenced folk rock scene. By the early ‘70s Hiroki was gracing recordings by groups like his own Hachimitsupai or Happy End and appearing in iconic early recordings by burgeoning stars like Eiichi Ohtaki, Haruomi Hosono, and Yumi Arai.
However by 1975, as Hiroki would describe below in his own words, Hiroki fell into a deep slump/depression and by his own admission lost his connection with music. In short notice, Hiroki would pick up an addiction to alcohol and withdraw completely from music for nearly a decade.
In his first comeback a sober reminder of his withering state snapped him back to life and trying to right his way among the living. His love of music would come back one day when he heard a piece by Beethoven that rocked him to his core. At age 28, Hiroki would pick up in his first new direction not acting as bit player but full-fledged accompanist for others. Working with forward-thinking artists like Akiko Yano, Daisaku Kume, Compostela, and reuniting with his old Hachimitsupai group was fruitful. As Hiroki made more music he felt an obligation to give back.
Saying goodbye to his music career again, Hiroki would dedicate himself to charity and volunteer his time helping others through NGOs in Japan. Feeling unfilled by music again, he saw in charity and religious devotion something far more personally enriching.
Then one day while sitting in some grass field, enjoying some rest, once again music came calling again. Feeling and hearing the vibrant sounds of nature and remembering the distant memories of church music that once shook him at his core, Hiroki felt the urge to make music again.
At the age of 40, Hiroki would go back into the studio and try to take his pedal steel guitar into places he never thought it would go. Using all sorts of gadgetry, reverbs, and painstaking multi-track recording sessions, sketches of long, floating pedal steel guitar melodies became even more atmospheric, ambient soundscapes.
Feliz, released in 1992, brings to mind so many influences. There’s the obvious ones, the chamber music of J.S. Bach as in “トッカータ (Toccata)” and the embers of its title track. Then there’s less obvious ones from the weightless Americana-tinged ambient music of Eno showing another branch in Hiroki’s “風の散歩 (Wind, Through The Air)”. “飛翔 (Hishô)” goes deep through country/western circles of global deserts to come up with his own intricate graceful exploration.
In the end, what you hear in Feliz and can really get through its full liner notes is Hiroki’s love of this little venerated instrument. Devoting himself to actually teaching you what it does and how it works — even going so far as to give you one quick lesson — Feliz comes across as this prophetic work trying to get others to follow along with him. This is where I’d rather let him to take it away:
I started playing as a professional at the age of twenty-one, and have been playing in rock, folk, and pop recordings and concerts as a band or as an individual for nearly 40 years since then. However, among such musicians, there were many slump times in my musical life. Even in my late twenties, at that time, I read the Bible at home and listened only to classical music, and as I gradually became more and more distant from the music I was involved in as a job and the industry itself, I felt a void.
It was then, the days of soaking in alcohol began to occur. One autumn night when my family slept, I was feeling sick and suffering from nausea, and I was looking at my face in the bathroom mirror while I was so thin that I had nothing to vomit. When I was looking at the face that had lost life, something powerful that denies me and affirms my true self swelled and popped in my heart.
At that moment, I felt like the light was returning to my surroundings, as if I woke up from sleep, and there was a God-like existence in reality, and that existence was in such a night when everyone fell asleep.
I knew that I was pouring my love into it. Immediately, I clung to my headphones and listened to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 “Fate”.
Then, tears overflowed from the chaos at the end of the third movement, where the fanfare of the victory of the fourth movement echoed, and I could not stop. At that time, I learned that music is a gift of love in the first place. And I started to create music. It was when I was twenty-eight. Soon after, I left the music industry and started to face “nature” by joining a brown rice vegetarian promotion group. For the last seven years, I’ve been participating in civic group events and selling organic vegetables, but at one point I had an experience that fundamentally changed my musical life.
It was when I was helping out in Yakushima to clear up, I was sitting on the grassland and thinking about it alone. A lot of things disappeared in my mind, but eventually my heart calmed down, and I stopped listening to various noises and “thoughts”, and started hearing the sound of the wind and the voices of the island.
I can now listen to sound. And at one moment, the switch in my ear switched from active to passive. I didn’t know if I should stop listening to the sound in my left brain and start listening in my right brain, but there was a change in my consciousness.
I was in a huge space filled. There was a space inside me, and there was me inside it. I encountered sound. I found that I used to listen to sounds with explanations. This was the sound of the wind, this was the bird’s voice, and all the sounds were labeled and listened to.
It was a discovery. What a beauty the sound itself was when I listened to it without such a thing. The birds squealing in different directions, the blowing wind swaying through the air as it runs up a hill in the distance. Clear and deep depth, a space that spreads forever.
I knew I hadn’t listened to anything until then. I found out that all sounds were passed through a filter called “judgment.” After a while I realized that my ears had returned to normal, but the Irakura that I came to was nothing more than a signboard to sell self-assertion and details in this divine space. I knew that, maybe, I don’t need music.
When I started to think so, the message of birds came into my ears. “We are also singing.” Yes, humans should do so too, then I had a glimpse of the vision of music that should be realized. At the same time, I decided to restart my musical activity again. In 1980, it was a black experience at Kirishima, but 12 years later, this album came out to the world. Nowadays, I’m blushing for a very boring performance, but here’s the first answer I reached when I was about forty years old. It would be greatly appreciated if you could feel my enthusiasm at the time in this world of sound I created by fighting with an analog multitrack tape recorder by myself.
– Hiroki Komazawa (from liner notes to Feliz)