environmental music

  • ichiko hashimoto ichiko 1984

    Ichiko Hashimoto on acoustic piano, synthesizer, and vocal – that’s what the liner notes to Ichiko Hashimoto’s one and only release on Music Interior states as musician credits. Titled Ichiko and graced by a truly autumnal album cover, it’s an album that truly sounds like it looks. Ichiko is a musician well-versed in two worlds. As a trained pianist she…

  • A promise tendered is a debt owed. I hinted at more music from Music Interior and here’s my first share. Let’s begin our brief sojourn discovering the albums released by Music Interior with Yoshio Suzuki’s meditative Morning Picture. Who was Yoshio Suzuki? On this album he wasn’t quite the musician he was known to be. Three…

  • It’s not often you get a peek at something legitimately different. Released in 1985, on Canadian record label Attic, Sounds from the Interior (The Music Interior Sampler) seems to mimic the iconic New Age Windham Hill Record Samplers of the ’80s. We all know the drill now. Frame a compelling nature scene on a stark white album…

  • Some music is really hard to describe. Not because it’s indescribable, but because the vast amount of background info required to contextualize the work might be either a) too academic or b) too conceptual to get. Yoshi Ojima’s truly spartan website describes his music plainly as: Yoshio Ojima uses computers to program gentle, ambient music.…

  • Recorded by Hiroshi Yoshimura at his private studio, Hiroh 806, using Yamaha DX7, TX7, and FB01 synthesizers, a Roland MSQ-700 sequencer and a Victor AV computer. That’s exactly what the Sona Gaia release of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green stated in its liner notes. That can’t be. You put on Green, and the things that last with you, long after the…

  • It’s easy to get away with music that sounds like something. Vast store shelves are littered with “albums” proclaiming exactly what you’ll hear inside. Relaxing Sounds of the Rainforest, Nights in Ireland, Serenity and Bliss Mix, etc. all serving as perfect sonic backgrounds to whatever space you want them to live in. But is this…

  • Hiroshi Yoshimura was commissioned in 1984 by Japanese multi-national personal care company Shiseido to create something that might be entirely out of his own wheelhouse: music that could complement a fragrance. It’s a pitch that would sound ludicrous to most musicians but for Hiroshi presented a magnificent idea.

  • Self-released on cassette in 1983, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Pier & Loft earns the distinction of being both his most hard to find record (Discogs prices pointing upwards of $100 now) and also, surprisingly, his most accessible. The problem, of course, has been finding actual audio of it. On this release he took his environmental music somewhere new. You…

  • Every Hiroshi Yoshimura record is a bit of something very special. Versed in the mastery of combining environmental sound with personal music, every bit of Hiroshi’s recordings speaks of the special connection we as beings of this earth have with the feelings our surroundings can inspire. A lot of people hate technology, a lot of people feel there is…

ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic