Disclaimer: you’re not going to hear any music on Jun Kawabata’s Mind Migration (Voyage To The Whale). What you’re hearing on this release is the kind of healing music little known on this side of the world. In the early ’90s CBS Sony created a record sublabel dubbed “Aqua Planet” combining three things: aquatic themed environmental music, field recordings, and wildlife photography under one banner.
Under Aqua Planet notable Japanese wildlife photographers like Hiroya Minakuchi, with field recordings like Chihiro Ito, Eiji Mori and others to either match them with music of “aquatic nature” or to simply redefine it in such a way where the sum of the parts can be put together as a collection of some deep BGM. Matching images with sound. Matching music with a theme succinctly for a greater purpose.
In the past, we had a taste of this Aqua Planet with Tomoyuki Asakawa’s Relaxation Music Harp And Wave as he used the sounds of rivers, estuaries, and rain to create powerful ambiance backgrounding elegiac reimagining of past-time Americana. Here, a trip yielding a bounty of compelling sea photography of dolphins, orcas, and other sea mammals in various ocean locales is combined with equally rich field recordings by sadly, little-known sound designer Jun Kawabata who treats them as a collage for a special kind of music.
Below you’ll find a translation of their tour and what each moment in time is capturing (as stated in the original release of Mind Migration (Voyage To The Whale)).
Cruising with mind in water…
The intelligent swimmers. A fun diversion on a monotonous ocean journey: the arrival of the dolphins. Every day they visit the ship and play with the waves. On the different ocean one travels, one encounters the most different whales and dolphins. In the wind, you can feel your breath, your voices underwater penetrate your ear – this is the highlight of an ocean journey. Our ship glides along the surface of the water, from the Arctic Ocean in the far north to the sparkling oceans of the south.
I. Prologue Far North (5:22) Our ocean journey begins when we are invited by the mysterious call of the Risso’s dolphin and hammerhead whales. A loud crack, caused by the massive collapse of the glaciers, announces the short summer in the Arctic Ocean. When the flat-falling ice blocks melt in the summer sun, bubble bubbles trap the air bubbles trapped since time immemorial. The seals, resting on the floating ice, are disturbed by my kayak and slide into the sea. We are in Alaska, Prince William Sound.
II. Sea Canary (6:18) In the north, on the steel-blue sea surface, the white dress of the belugas appears as if they wanted to wake the eyes of the beholder. It is said that the purity of white nights in the summer of the North Pole is almost entirely similar to the snow-white form of these dolphins. They are also called “canaries of the sea” because their voice, which fills the sea, resembles the song of those little birds, as our ship drifts through a herd of a hundred heads, we can hear their lively voices rising from the surface of the water spread.
III. Wake Of The Forest (4:41) One morning, a thick fog covered the forest, the constant call of an eagle echoed through the trees, and we woke up. From the clear stream that passed through a gully, you could hear the voices of the American squirrels. We moved away from the island chain, which is covered in dense coniferous forests and stretches like a net across the coastline of Southeast Alaska. This calm sea is the feeding ground of hammerhead whales in summer. In front of our ship, a whale slowly floats past with his boy. Sound recordings from the Frederick Bay.
IV. Orca (7:14) In ancient Japanese chronicles, whales and cracked dolphins do not exist. But there are scholars who say that these animals are mentioned in oral traditions. Probably the story of the dolphin families, whose vivid voices echoed in the water of the sea, was told by parents to their children. These sound recordings are from a beach on a strait in Canada. Here, the dolphins play by rubbing their bodies on the seabed. They produce sounds like little stones falling down.
V. Dolphin Encounter (4:33) The wind that blew across the surface of the ocean ripped up the ocean. I felt a wonderful feeling as I drifted on the ocean, and the voices of the dolphins that were heard cleaned my hearing. Then I took care, and at some point a dolphin herd appeared near me and swam around. The squeaking sounds they make are like a sonar. By capturing the echo of their own pulse, they can determine positions and shapes. On the high seas off the west coast of America.
VI. Beyond The Reef (3:51) Even if you have the latest measuring instruments on board, which can receive the radio waves via radar or satellite and calculate the current position of the ship, then it is still a journey on the oceans even in the age of ocean crossings still filled with the thrill of adventure. When it storms, one prays for calm water, and when the water is calm, the next storm is already waiting. As one listens skeptically to the weather forecast on the radio, one learns of a storm and straightens the sails firmly. We are in the middle of the Pacific, beyond the Tropic of Cancer.
VII. Whale Song (8:14) In the clear. blue ocean waters echo with a rhythmic melody. These are the love songs of the hammerhead whales, which shoot up from the bottom of the deep sea like boiling water, only to penetrate into the deep blue water again. When these colossi with their body length of 12.3 meters and a weight of 30 tons try to give something of themselves, then you can not only hear them with their ears, but you can also feel the vibrations with your own body. Shots from Mexico, Revilla-Gigedo Archipelago.
VIII. Water Planet (7:02) The breaking waves foam white on the coast, and the wind blowing over the sea absorbs the spray. When the sun begins to tilt towards the west, one hears the voices of the oystercatchers rising in large swarms into the air. I stand on the beach and draw in my memory the image of a white whale, his huge, bright body, which one could once see in this sea. He retreated to southern waters. When he passes by the surface of the sea, his gasping voice sounds like a distant thunder that shakes the whole body of the sea with its deep sound. Shots from Mexico, Gulf of California.
Biography: Hiroya Minakuchi – Born in 1953 in Osaka. After graduating from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Kyoto, he joined the Kodansha publishing house. He works in the editing department for scientific publications. While working in various offices in the US, Canada and Mexico, he makes numerous photographs of whales and dolphins. In 1984 he leaves the company. From then on he worked as a journalist mainly on photographs and writings in a photo studio. His broad activities include book publishing, contributing to magazines and video filing. Main books: “Journey to the Whales”, “ORCA – The Royal Dolphins of the Seas and the Voice of the Wind”, as well as the illustrated books “Giant Whales” and “Dolphins”.