What is “earth”? This element we can use all our senses to comprehend, means more than just that. For the second part of my series with NTS, I imagine I had an easier task imagining it musically, than “earth” illustrator Laura Gomez had to capture its spirit visually. How do you hear something “earthy”?
In my prior post, I came to the conclusion that Japanese ambient music had an added element of spiritual environmentalism. Using that cue, I took it upon the most elemental element to put music to a word. Earth is organic. Earth is textural. Earth is granular.
All the music you’ll hear today has that spirit: to create something organic out of whatever man-made tools we have. Just to pull a name out from the mix: Hideki Matsumori. His track “Tabu” from 彩 (Colours) sounds positively tantric and organic, yet it roots lie in copious amounts of synthetic sound module libraries. As much as we chase this drive to escape earth, so many things reveal our ties to it.
It’s an earthly trick which the mind has trouble understanding through ears. “Earth” is three dimensional, but we’re at our best serving it, when we meet it through a higher dimension that doesn’t meet it exactly how we know it.
Ambient Japan 1980-1993, Vol. 2: Earth
- Yoshiaki Ochi – Ear Dreamin’
- Killing Time – Kokorowa
- New Child – Yaponesia Sakura
- Eitetsu Hayashi – カラビンカ (Karabinka)
- Mkwaju Ensemble – Tira-Rin
- Hideki Mitsumori – Tabu
- Seigén Ono – World Collision
- Acoustic Club – Porto
- Hajime Mizoguchi – King Kong In “Java”
- Mich Live – Planet E
- Ichiko Hashimoto – Opening The Door Of Heaven, There Overflowed The Orange Shine
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