I hate to say this but this review might be one of the lighter ones. Not because of the album itself – the whole package is truly wonderful (a mix of nostalgia, elegance, and a certain uniqueness, tying quasi-ambient, quasi-neoclassical music with gorgeous photography of Hokkaido) – but because of the lack of information about the person who created its music. However, let’s have some fun. Let’s see if you can follow along and do a little bit of research with me, sussing out together what we can.
First, if you can see the album cover above, you’ll notice these words: “Masami Ota x Masumi Takahashi – Biei-Furano” and “Sound Synforest: from Northland label”. Put yourself in my shoes and think of where to start. Logically, your mind goes to the names Masami Ota and Masumi Takahashi. Liner notes on the CD point to Masami composing, arranging, and performing all the tracks on this album. As for Masumi, he is credited for all the photography on this release.
Online searches for any current/archived information for Masami Ota (or 太田正美, to be more precise) yield no clues to who this artist was or why they came to this project. I’ll spare you the Japanese script from the liner notes and share that the only mention of what Masami’s role was, was to create “imaginative lyrical sounds to describe the original scenery of Biei and Furano” as photographed by Masumi Takahashi. Masumi Takahashi (or 高橋真澄, to be more exacting) that might be a name that can lead us somewhere.
You’d enter “高橋真澄” into your search engine of choice and discover reams of information. Masami, as you can surmise now, has built a reputation as a fantastic photographer who’s areas of expertise revolve around taking landscape photos of his native Hokkaido. Around 70 or more picture books have been graced by Masami’s wonderfully colorful and wide-lens photos. The CD booklet itself has around 13 full-color photos. Ten of these have unique scenes tied to specific songs on the album. Excellent. Now we’re getting somewhere! Now let’s see if we can tie the whats and whys of this collaborative work. To do so we have to look at the top right and look at that space that states: “Sound Synforest – from Northland label”.
Sound Synforest (or “シンフォレスト”, say it with me: “to be more precise”) yields results that tie it to a certain Japanese audio/visual company that got its start in 1994 by trying to use computer multimedia as a means to deliver environmental music, BGV (background videos), and literature to both the growing wellness music market and to the corporate world – think restaurants, spas, and other commercial venues. シンフォレスト 美瑛・富良野 (Biei-Furano), for all intents and purposes, was an early attempt to cross-platform music and photography in a new medium, to a new consumer more tied to their desktop computer than to a bookstore. In the rush to capitalize on the popularity of forest bathing (and other hyper modern forms of wellness) it made sense that a “synthetic forest” could be of some use to the market.
Before the rise of file sharing and in the heyday of multimedia CDs, as you can imagine, companies like Sound Synforest unknowingly would benefit by signing all sorts of musicians from that generation of musicians that grew up on, now classic ambient music, on those that had lived a long enough life to understand the rise of the more technical form of New Age, on those that could make sincere relaxation music but also get away with being engaging healing music. It’s in that brew of next-wave corporatization of healing music that such an interesting album could be created.
If we take off my shoes, and put on our “critic” hat, we can surmise that songs like “春・ほのかな憧れ” served as perfect mini-vignettes into the stunning imagery that caught the eyes of the CDs original purchasers. Hypnotic slices of burbling synths floating around barely there quasi-organic atmosphere that dissolves into more standard classical faire, point to Masami trying his best to match the deep moods of Masumi’s two-dimensional photos. Meditative melodic pieces like “ラベンダーの記憶” are horizon-filling neoclassical musical heavies that zero in perfectly into the wistful, autumnal selection of photos Masumi took of the farmlands of Biei and the lavender fields of Furano.
Nowadays, if one can look past the bevy of CD-is, VCDs, DVDs, Blu-rays and other continuously formats in process of dating themselves, all that trafficked in such attempts to get beyond the muzak of all pasts, one can see that perhaps the lasting impressions of their most meaningful releases are those whose images and music play much like the ones on this record. Although all of the images on this album cover various seasons, an overriding sense of autumnal nostalgia courses through Masami’s music, something you can’t just brush off.
Masami Ota and Masumi Takahashi’s シンフォレスト 美瑛・富良野 (Biei-Furano), much like others in the series, like Franky Ueshima and Shinichi Eguchi’s 水の旋律 (Water) and Mitsuhiro and Yukihito Arai’s 霞と霧 (Haze x Fog), belong to that ever blurring line asking us to discern between what is something being sold to you and what is something that sold itself to you. It’s an exercise that requires a bit of our own legwork, as one can see.