Forgive my roundabout way to get back to the healing music of Japan’s Awa record label. I feel like we should go back to Okinawa and discover where it all began. It is on しおのみち (Shio-No-Michi) that Hideaki Masago rounded up like minded Japanese musicians to fashion a label that could tap into ethnic music from across the world in a way that is fundamentally forward thinking. “Shio No Michi” that ancient Japanese salt road traversing the Sea of Japan and the Pacific, would serve as their guiding symbol looking within to reassess how they can reimagine their own folk traditions. I presented snippets of this work before. Today, let’s get a fuller picture of their totemic first work.
Drawing from musicians from experimental worlds, some from ethnic folk groups, and others in the environmental music fields, Awa based itself in Okinawa, closer to the rural Japanese countryside on purpose. Under the guise of painter and woodwind musician Hideaki, all the artists that would perform and record under the Awa label did so not to promote a specific folkloric tradition but to capture a certain aesthetic. It was his desire to create a new Japanese folk music that could absorb and fuse in global influences without losing its own underpinning and in doing so truly discover the foundations their own traditions come from.
Fittingly, Awa, that word for foaming or bubbling, took shape in the myriad styles covered by all those contributing to every compilation or who would venture elsewhere, recording their own music.
As they put it themselves:
“Shio no Michi” is an anthology of sounds created by the consciousness of people living on the earth using the sounds of various folk instruments, regardless of the country or ethnic group. Based on the elements of folk music, it expresses a natural and fundamental feeling through a unique arrangement that is simple and modern.
The first compilation released by Awa, 1991’s しおのみち (Shio-No-Michi), rounded up the work of environmental musicians like Maro who contributes an ethno-electro New Age song fittingly as watery as the album cover was drawn, and included artists like Hiromi Kondo and Keita who drew from African and Jamaican traditions through their own unlikely backgrounds as frequent guests of those locales. It’s no wonder those two would later venture further into their own worlds as Amana (creating Popol Vuh-like New Age) and Keita’s own dub-influenced avant folk. Others like Indra Gurung and Gorobaba drew from Indian and Antipodean folk tradition.
しおのみち (Shio-No-Michi) is a true smorgasbord of a listen. Although they were all tasked by Hideaki to capture sonically what he painted, all of them cover that symbolic essence of “traveling the flow of a tide” in a way that’s uniquely theirs. Percussionist Koichi Hamada takes great joy in using it’s symbolism creating upbeat, tantric music that owes a large debt to the Indonesian and SE Asian instruments he drew from.
Hideaki Masago’s own work “Sono-Mama” gives a small glimpse of some of the vast influences he drew from in his creative endeavors — here the influence of West Africa is evident. Maro, an ensemble that would give rise to future ethno-ambient band Koh-Tao (or would offshoot from them following their leader Bun), somehow found a way to connect Iberian, Anitolian, and field recordings to create their own slice of healing music — even if its done so through shamisen and kalimba.
If you have the time (or the album in front of you), give yourself the allowance to appreciate all the wonderful instruments that Hideaki took the time to sketch out as playing a huge role in each of the tracks. Before the internet and before our digital global connections existed, someone out there was using these wonderful photos and artwork to try to piece together whatever else of the outer musical world was still a mystery to them. In these eight tracks perhaps you might discover another world that I can’t wait to get to more of shortly.