There’s a palpable meditation hovering around Lyu Hong-Jun’s masterwork 大地の詩, otherwise known as “Songs Of The Earth” or “Earth Songs”. Recorded for pioneering Japanese prefab home maker Misawa Home, landing place of equally pioneering musical works by Hiroshi Yoshimura and Yutaka Hirose, this album was supposed to provide another soundtrack to the unique, holistic experience they were selling. It’s an album consisting of only duets between Lyu (a master Chinese reed player) and Hiroki Miyano (a master Japanese guitarist) both who had started to make this shift into New Age music. Persuaded to venture into a realm where they could combine Lyu’s deep study of ancient occidental music tradition and Hiroki’s quiet, experimental lean, the album took steps to address what could have been a mess into something quite moving.
Lyu Hong-Jun began his career and life in China, not as a musician, but as a operatic and/or theater dancer. As stated elsewhere, it appears in China he felt stifled by their reluctance to allow him to pursue painting and music, as forms he could study and combine into new compositions. Unable to be a renaissance man in China, Lyu would leave his homeland and land in Japan to study ancient Eastern music without any reservation.
The Victor label gave Lyu his first opportunity to record his compositions. Drawing from ancient Chinese song, on 1986’s Fantastic Pipes of China, he was able to distill the Chinese reed technique modern compositions driven by xiāo, kouxian, or sheng (the Chinese mouth organ). Although part of Victor’s CD series dubbed the “Ethnic Sound Series”, Fantastic Pipes of China showed Lyu he could venture into the Japanese realm, through a transfiguration of sorts.
Hiroki Miyano was the perfect foil to do so. On his guitar he was tasked to translate music meant for reed instruments into something approximating the voicing, feeling, and expression necessary to truly play with Lyu. Setting aside prejudice, which they tried to due to past, macro nationalist history, both Lyu and Hiroki had the unenviable task of forging a shared musical dialogue (Chinese and Japanese) that could fill the space of something that could be truly lifeless — a prefabricated home.
Nasally and pleading, the choice of instruments played by Lyu, some like the Vietnamese Kèn bầu, the jaw harp, and more, here, on this album, they appear to adopt or adapt to a different form. Here they’re granted a certain distance from any distinctly Chinese or Japanese experience. It’s an attempt to transcend something. If you remember R. Carlos Nakai‘s experience in Japan, here’s another bit of wandering wonder.
The opener “水郷への想い” is a gorgeous, almost “free” version of an adapted traditional that was once faithful to a certain past, although in fue form, through a future album titled Pipes Of The Minority Peoples, yet here it gains a mesmerizing, melodic quality akin to the drone music of Ireland, offset by Hiroki Miyano’s minimal plucks punctuating truly gorgeous phrasing.
When both Lyu and Hiroki venture further out, as they would on tracks like “高砂の女”, the bau remains this constant, deeply human thing that performs the role a vocalist might have, sussing out melancholic vibrations that cut right through. Underlining the pain of something not quite understood, it’s an immediate breathtaking song that sprawls through all sorts of complex changes, only to come back to something simple and poignant. A feeling of nostalgia or yearning, permeates throughout the album, it’s what drives another sublime song like “フルスーの景” which uses drones to punctuate all sorts of varied, hypnotic melodic runs Lyu ventures through, that Hiroki cycles through.
Never quite jazz or traditional, on songs like “伴侶の守歌” or “にわとりと蝿” the duo siphons far-flung ideas from Brazil or Indonesia, I liken it to the spirit/music of Hermeto Pascoal’s own, presenting their version of tone poems, for things that could be. You can cry to 大地の詩, you can work to 大地の詩, you can even reminisce quite deeply to 大地の詩, and yes, you can even dance to 大地の詩. Life’s simple and inviting, (what more does one need?) with music like this. What can I say?大地の詩just adds a certain something…