For any who’ve had first-hand experience with Japan, something that must have struck you as it did me is just how much background music plays a role in “filling a room” so to speak. Whether you’re at your local kombini, shuffling through a train station, or trying to sample a fragrance, some sort of instrumental music or atmospheric sound (most likely than not) will be playing in that environment. And on rare occasions, some of that BGM (background music/muzak) does more than just hang in the air – it settles in your ears and really adds something to the experience transforming the object you’re looking at or the space into something memorable. It’s exactly this idea of environmental music that Takahiro Kaneko’s Meets Hati perfectly encapsulates.
Takahiro Kaneko is a Japanese musician, arranger, composer, and producer. He began his career as a musician during his student years, notably as a member of the band Rebecca, Big Horns Bee, and his most widely known contribution, that with the wildly successful Japanese New Wave band, Kome Kome Club.
Born in 1964, in Narashino, a suburb of Chiba, Japan, Takahiro came of age in an era when the electronically-inspired rock of YMO pushed him to pursue a path into music. He began by taking piano lessons until distaste for “classical” training spurred him to take up guitar and sax. To his parent’s dismay, Takahiro would turn up on the banks of the Hanami River to busk as a saxophonist, honing his performance skills, until one day he’d quit university altogether. In due time, Takahiro wound up joining as a sax man on recordings by Japanese salsa group, Orquesta de la Luz and a band that would transition into becoming the brass-led Big Horns Bee band.
It was with the Big Horns Bee band that Takahiro would experiment and learn synthesizers and keyboards. By the time Kome Kome Club vocalist, Tatuya Ishii, invited Takahiro to join the group, a fortuitous opportunity as Takahiro – as a composer and arranger – had already begun to branch out into writing music for commercials, film, and TV. Thankfully for us, what would lead to creation of Meets Hati wasn’t entirely up to Takahiro’s own vision.
While Kome Kome’s Tutaya was known as a singer, his creative passions cast a wider net. As an artist, Tutaya had this whole other side of him that found him creating paintings, sculpture, product and character design. By 1993, Tatuya had taken the ultimate step for a multi-disciplinary artist: he’d open up a gallery.
In Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, “G△lleri△ H△ti” would open up to serve as a store where Tatuya could express that different side of his artistry. There you could find anything from hand-sculpted ornaments made from terracotta or fiberglass to experimental pieces of fashion and jewelry, all designed by Tatuya himself. Mail-order catalogs were sent out, where subscribers could get the latest seasonal products on sale, with interviews featuring the artist explaining what’s in store. What brought Takahiro Kaneko into this world was Tutaya’s understanding that this space needed something to complete the atmosphere of the place. For this reason, Tutaya would ask Takahiro to create music for the space.
Takahiro’s visit to the gallery put into fruition a few things. First, it was that this music had to be minimalist, to match the grounded, earth tones of Tatuya’s creations. Second, was that the music had to feel like it was as organic as the ingredients used to make what’s on display. Finally, there had to be some acknowledgement of the artifice or inorganic-aspect of the gallery – in the end, human hands did (in effect) create the space and design.
It would take many visits to Tatuya’s G△lleri△ H△ti for Takahiro to understand the kind of music he’d create. What Takahiro would notice as a recurrent theme was: spirals. Whether in sculpture, the store’s checkout area, or in the G△lleri△ H△ti’s branding, the idea of spiraling, circular, design was everywhere. With that in mind he returned to his home studio and began crafting pieces of music that would fit this environmental aesthetic.
Using samplers, he’d take inspiration from the hand-molded works and stick to tones that mimic organic percussion, drones, and tones, even if the temptation from all this “modern” instrumentation was to make it more synthetic. Organic instruments would be recorded and reimagined through computer-based arrangements. In the end, this music would conceive itself as warm and inviting, but also unafraid to explore edges that were a bit dissonant and less easily understood.
Takahiro Kaneko’s vision of “healing music”, seemingly, took inspiration from the more esoteric music and sounds heard by those who work with their hands. You hear this in his use of hand bells and resonating spheres, on the meditative opener, “Inspiral”. The presence of the kalimba/mbira and gurgling synth tones on “Work #2” brings to mind the hypnotic sound heard by those toiling away in sunlit fields and paddies. In some way, Meets Hati sounds like the aural equivalent of making sense of the value placed in inanimate objects.
Songs like “Marine-Harp” do wonderful work in using the bare minimum, tonally, to affect the idea of a seaside memory. It’s the sea (as heard through a conch shell). This human ability to create images out of sound extends to the “Indi△” where tell-tale sonic markers of that nation’s music – sonorous droning strings – disappear into the release of a synthetic string pad where the steady, syncopated, backbeat is really the glue that holds it together.
You’ll get songs like “Incantation” that draw out gorgeous South East Asian-inspired gamelan-driven tones and melodies that evoke a certain haunting quality to the Meets Hati. Moments of impressionistic solo piano, like on “Yoo-Sei”, place Takahiro’s jettisoned “classical” studies in a new light; leaning into a more spiritual place, he performs a rumination that can only be described as, “lived-in”.
That larger inspiration drawn from the gallery, that of finding a certain beauty – let’s call it based on the Fibonacci Sequence – in music that can spiral like thrown clay, makes an appearance in a recurring leitmotif heard on “2nd Wave (Inspiral)”. Through this bit of ambient music, you can see the glory of organic design. “Work #1” drills down deeper in an earlier idea, giving new structure to an existing theme.
Rather than trying to overpower the space this CD was supposed to exist in, Meets Hati has highly expressive, minimalist tracks – tracks like the last three: “Aurora”, “Sigh”, and “Ri-Toh” – that find that perfect point between being part of your background and placing your foreground in a different light. One can only hope that those who ventured to Tatuya’s gallery stuck around just enough to hear it more thoroughly, as we will.
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