Banka (Late Summer). What a name? Before I get ahead of myself, my apologies for not sharing the work of Shinsuke Honda much earlier. It’s one of my flaws as a music writer. I see music not in a stylistic sense but through an environmental lens. If it’s not in season, it’s not the time for me to speak to it. Now, I do think we’re in that season, the season for Shinsuke’s masterful work. A product of his search for that “love, ambient, breeze”, it’s this album where Shinsuke’s visionary ambient guitar technique meets his devotion to something new: healing music to culminate into something special.
Shinsuke Honda was born in Hiroshima just five years removed from its wordly introduction via nuclear bombing. Growing up in the ambers of its reconstruction placed a young Shinsuke through the unenviable task of rising from the ruins, living in a new world where his history had to be created from the ground up. And much like many young Japanese upstarts, this new generation had to navigate the cultural waters, trying to draw inspiration from the best left from their home and the rest, elsewhere.
As a musician, Shinsuke began his career in Japan’s folk circuit, picking up guitar as his lead instrument. In the early ‘70s, a chance meeting with Keiichi Suzuki at a folk jamboree cemented a personal and professional relationship, together they’d resurrect what was left of Morio Agata’s rock band, Honey Pie/Hachimatsu Pai, and invite violinist Masahiro Takekawa and later pedal steel guitarist Hiroki Komazawa to form what would be the iconic version of Hachimatsu Pai.
Thoroughly indebted to the en vogue folk rock sounds of America’s West Coast — think the Byrds, Grateful Dead, etc. — and the roots rock of The Band and latter-day Beatles, Hachimatsu Pai, in essence were the rawer, rootsier, answer to Happy End’s pioneering jaunt. Albums like the totemic Sentimental City, done under his stellar guitar work, brought to mind the angular guitar rock of Neil Young. This group could be lovely and quite melodious but be unafraid to go for pure rock boogie.
After the group broke up in the mid ‘70s due to artistic differences, most of them went on to form other influential groups like Moonriders and off to successful solo careers. Shinsuke, at first struggled with this change. Trying his hand at jazz, he tried to explore fusion and more experimental rock jamming in a group he’d call Dachshund. However, by the late ‘70s following that rabbit hole led him without a record contract.
Shinsuke’s champion turn came in 1978. Around that time the rise of commercial BGM and soundtrack work had afforded him an ability to quietly work behind the scenes creating instrumental music for all things from adult films to mainstream theatrical releases, commercials, and TV. In short time, his own sensibility started to flower with such creative work.
At the start of the ‘80s as “New Age” music began its first ascent as a thing to market, soon the Apollon label came knocking asking Shinsuke to see if he’d like to sign and record an album in that style. 1983’s Silence – サイレンス (夕映え), recorded completely under his own, would be one of part of a series they’d dub “Resort Mind Music”. Much like Takashi Kokubo’s own interior music, Shinsuke’s version was meant to express the moods necessary to relax at home. What came back couldn’t be further from their expected muzak.
For Shinsuke, it appeared that on 1983’s Silence he’d draw influence from the plaintitive, meditative, instrumental blues of past guitar heroes like Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green (whose iconic “Albatross” appeared like a guiding post) to the forlorn sounds of forgotten surf music giants, sunset-soundtracking country-rock, and smidge of the new school American Primitive guitar heard under the Windham Hill label. With Shinsuke, this stew of influences went through the prism of ever present ambient sonics, placing heavy use of spatial effects like reverb, tremolo, and delay to create mini guitar symphonies dripping with nostalgic moods. An exploration of synthesis, likewise, yielded his own take on the hazy moods of unplaceable moody exotica. If Steve Hiett had a brother in spirit that year, surely its closest kin was Shinsuke.
Then, as brilliantly as this first solo album was released in the world, he had to tend to other things now. For the span of five years, trying to make ends meet, Shinsuke would once again go back to commercial work. It wouldn’t be until the late ‘80s, after reuniting with Hachimatsu Pai for a brief run of reunion concerts that he got the writing bug again. No longer a spring chicken, now a mature middle aged musician in his own right, Shinsuke took advantage of another chance to create to make music soundtracking a new medium of BGM for Apollon, a series of Laserdiscs マリンパラダイス」シリ that he could use to rethink/relaunch his solo work.
Going deeper into his ties to the coastal life, to the sound and music provoking the ideation of coast lines, shade, and air, in 1991’s Late Summer, decades of trenchant work behind the scenes led to this his freest one. Here, on songs like “Poetry Of The Forest”, “Sad Wind” and “Afterglow”, pastoral vignettes were distant guitar visions untied to much of his rock past. Here songs like “Dreamland”, “Summer Clouds”, and “Moonlight Night”, hint at the worldly, Balearic strains of instrumental jazz he could create to invoke some of his most graceful, romantic bliss using solely a guitar and a barely there synthetic atmosphere.
In the past, Shinsuke might have struggled to encapsulate what made his music worthy of its own place in this, our world. But here, in Banka (Late Summer), he captured that really rare airs of nostalgic time when we’re in between everything. “A Walk Of The Seaside” treasures the relationships in the here and now, yet plucks at the heartstrings with dashes of the changes that have come to be and those (we know) must be coming soon.
Somewhere, wrapped behind that gorgeous zen watercolor cover painting, were the universal feelings that can only be conjured when someone (perhaps this one) and that one is holding a breath, caught in some fork in the road. When one must go forward. Thankfully, at least for us, Shinsuke gave us one last look behind, bringing some of those never forgotten memories, ones that grow hazier every year, into his hand and onto those six strings to strum that feeling (one that might last more than just this time).
Here with us now, perhaps, we can meet each other much more differently next year, at the end of summer.