There’s a moment in Hiroya Minakuchi + Missing Link’s Dolphin that never ceases to take my breath away: a minute into “The Cradle Of The Ocean”, the sound of actual dolphin speech mingles with a plaintive piano melody to deliver a sublime aquatic ballad that exudes what I think is perfect example of “womb music”. Rather than use field recordings as mere ambiance, Jun Kawabata (who put music to Hiroya Minakuchi’s gorgeous marine photography and nature sound before) uses these captured memories to cement them into a deeper connection to a timeless eternal art. The music makes room for an environment, in turn that environment grows within the listening room shifting its audience to a different plane.
Haruomi Hosono tried once with Inoyama Land to get there, dropping microphones into submerged water tanks to enhance their aquatic-influenced music with equally watery sonics. Here, we can experience a different angle to meet this territory.
Released in 1993, the final one for CBS Sony’s Aqua Planet healing music series, Dolphin found Hiroya Minakuchi traveling to far flung locales in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean capturing all sorts of sights and sounds, putting his name behind a canvas, for music to be created later. Later on, in the background, Jun Kawabata would mix sound sound design and song craft (something he still does to this day) to create actual music that didn’t just mimic the sound of cetacean life but moved, accommodated, and explored music that felt of that world — our underwater world.
What do we, as creative people, as communicative people, imagine as our connection to the greater earth? When we think of going underneath, below sea level, our imagination might find a more sympatico expression by placing itself in the mind of our cetacean friends who spend all their life exploring this, their aquatic planet. Could you imagine tracks like “The Cradle Of The Ocean”, “Summer Days”, or “The City, Where I Encountered The Dolphin” working without this meeting of the minds?
On songs like “The Tree Sways In The Wind”, pitch perfect musical accompaniment portrays a different mood experienced in the ocean deep. The opening song, “Sunshine Again” and its musical reprise, somehow create Dream Pop which meets dolphin sound on its territory, shifting its piano, vocal, and slide guitar accompaniment with gliding movements suited for the feeling — Enya once before had her “Orinoco Flow” gamely speak to this idea.
Personal highlight, “Summer Days”, reminds me instantly of Eno’s equally beatific end to Before and After Science. Where “Spider And I” created a web of elegiac music to capture sound in a world without it, here, Jun creates a moving percolation of music for a world full of sound that we rarely get to hear. Then, there are other mysterious tracks like “The City, Where I Encountered The Dolphin” where overtone singing makes an appearance as a way to bring in the Pan-Pacific musical tradition of approximating that interspecies connection even if its under this fascinating yet somewhat different, electro-acoustic context.
Especially at this time of the year — it’s summer time here, if you happen to stumble upon this post in the future — I can’t recommend highly enough an album that takes you somewhere far from land in myriad ways you probably need to rediscover again before the season shifts somewhere else.