By fits and starts I struggled, for some reason, to create this latest mix for NTS. I had so many ideas. Scrapping them one by one, until I settled on something. “Fire”, this element could mean so many things. I wanted it to mean one thing: breath.
Our breath, unsurprisingly, is the biggest conduit varying our body’s internal temperature. Before we knew what fire was or how to make it, I wager, we knew that our breath had a tremendous amount of power to create something similar, along that line. Somewhere, in some time, as our intellectual capacity grew to actually understand how fire naturally occurs, we, naturally, realized how oxygen can both start it and regulate its intensity. We then realized how fire can be of some use.
With time, as we sat around this largely, man-made element, we grew to develop both a verbal and non-verbal vocabulary, appreciating the time to commune/enjoy with what it brought to us. The ability to sing, to harmonize with our fellow man, then allowed us to carry history or maintain knowledge forward, just due to the existence of this one element.
Then, as we became further separated from the main source of the fuel, fueling that element — organic things like wood, oils, etc. — we began to find ways to make that element uniquely potent, as a weapon to affect others, positively and negatively.
As I picked songs that touched on this idea of chanting, of breathing, of vocalizing into the meaning of this element, it struck for me a certain nerve. What are we doing? Is it trying to commune in, some way, with the organic things we dissipate, those that allow us to keep on going, until we then, in turn, become that such matter that further fuels this cycle?
Min’yō (Japan’s aeons old “call and response” sung, folk music tradition) was in my head when I tried to capture Japanese songs that saw something special in that power of our own breath and the place we get our fuel from. It’s up to us to choose whether this, our natural resource is for the greater good or for something else. How can our existence be infinite, if it’s always threatening to burn out?
Ambient Japan 1980-1993, Vol. 2: Fire Music
1. Hiroki Okano – Kagome
2. Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Gaia
3. Yas-Kaz – 浮いて沈んで、沈んで浮いて〜踏板遊び〜
4. Masahiro Sugaya – Tarikari Song
5. Takio Ito & Takio Band – 猫の子(岐阜県)
6. Kaoru Todoroki – Atmosphere Of The Forest
7. Motohiko Hamase – 雨の鳥
8. Tolerance – Misa (Gig’s Tapes In ‘C’)
9. Moon Riders – 超C調
10. Toshiyuki Honda – オウ・ロアン・デュ・モン・スーヴェニア
11. Akira Inoue – Forest Of Thought
12. Masahide Sakuma – Dormir
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