Forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but if I haven’t said it bears I’m saying it now: sometimes I (just like each of us) is just a vessel for the greater good. In this case, it’s facilitating keeping a bit of music history alive. So, a huge thank you to both Victor Hsu Jui-Ting (who’s on the ‘gram @hsujuiting) for sharing Yuki Takao’s 水の迷宮 / The Water Labyrinth with us (which you can listen to at Quantum Foam Sounds YouTube channel) and Tomoyuki (the curator of the retired-but-not-forgotten Post Ambient blog) for opening that trickle of a thought way back when.
You see, it was in 2013, when Mr. Fujii presented a truly inspired selection of unobtanium. If memory serves me correct, the track he shared from his Soundcloud was “月の舟 / A Moon Crew” off Yuki Takao’s 水の迷宮 / The Water Labyrinth. Forget Discogs, Japanese Yahoo Auctions, or eBay, as Tomoyuki hinted at in the post, the only way you could have heard the whole work it resided in was if you managed to chance a copy from the creator themself.
But I still remembered that fascinating bit of music. Not quite ambient, jazz, or New Age, that track featured combinations of electronic, acoustic, and field recordings that recalled the work of the greats like Isham and Lyle Mays but also the, then little known work of Yutaka Hirose and Toshifumi Hinata. However, first and foremost, what was memorable about it was that it was quite melodic, musical, and beautiful – something unlike much of the aural wallpaper ambient music can be. It was quite “luscious”-sounding as Tomoyuki related. Then, like all things one wants but ultimately fails to find, one files that bit of memory in the “keep dreaming” pile.
So, when dreams came true and a copy showed up for me to listen to, it rekindled a fond (not sound) memory of those early days when all of this kind of discovery seemed so ephemeral. Now I have a story to expand upon.
What I can share is that Yuki Takao had potential. They were just 24 years old when they set aside two weeks of studio time at the end of April and start of May, in the towny Jiyūgaoka neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan to put their ideas on what environmental music was and what it could be to recordable memory media.
As related in the liner notes, Yuki was born in Kobe, in 1967. Once again, another preternaturally gifted musician would already show at the age of 5 the ability to play piano and expand from, composing and performing for others as a young child. By the time Yuki was a teenager they’d already experienced and lived through the sweeping new Japanese culture that was being fomented as the great Japanese economic boom was rising.
In the beginning, Yuki parlayed their compositional and arranging skills to paid commissions working as composer for video media and getting their work on little-known/remembered compilation albums of library music. It was while doing the grunt work of a working musician that they’d discover this idea of “environmental music”. At Mitaka’s International Christian University, Yuki studied and researched the aesthetic of designing sound for architectural and environmental spaces.
And in some ways with all this bio writ, one can convincingly leave this out there: to infer that this “Yuki Takao” was actually the nom de plume of one Yuki Saito trying to do something far different, away from their J-Idol career (as inferred in some internet circles) — as for me, I’m not quite certain its her.
So, that aside, Yuki would ask themself: “How can one use sound as charity?” And answer it with this phrase, to use “the sound giving life to a space as it ought to be” as the central theme to the music they wanted to further explore. So, in 1990, when Yuki graduated from college they dedicated themself to bringing to fruition music that could add something meaningful to its listeners, to create music that added (not lessened) its environment.
Seemingly, self-financing the record, Yuki created the MeetS (aka Meet-Sound) label as a means to make that music on their own terms. Tonally, for 水の迷宮 / The Water Labyrinth they picked a specific palette. Water, harmony, and the avant-garde. Water distilled into the moon, purity and silence. Harmony signifying the “journey.” The avant-garde, expressed in simple colors, a smell, in nature, and with joy. Yuki relates to a wind chime chiming, while indigo-dyed linen gently blows in the breeze. How silence in the gaps between sounds forming what “Wa” truly means. All the “there” in cotidian Japanese life, existing in simple just sos.
You hear this in the beginning of “響きの庭 I ーうたかたー / In The Garden I -the birth of dew-” from 水の迷宮 / The Water Labyrinth. It’s the sound of water dropping on an empty vessel as bird song is heard in the distance. When the first strain of human-played sound is heard, it’s the plaintive plucks of a string instrument played by Yuki (as they’d play everything on the record) easing into the collective. Once the song ends water, environmental sound, and human instrument building to a certain balance, “Wa” in spirit.
It’s the spirit of harmony, to actually want to create music that stays with you that will fill out the remainder of Yuki’s album. “月の舟 / A Moon Crew” alludes to ideas gleaned from ambient worlds and expressed through a fusion with more lively jazz modalities. Although the track starts quietly it builds the soundstage until it becomes something else, “romancing the stone” so to speak.
Songs like “竜神の舞 / At The Iridescent Market” remind of the work of Hajime Mizoguchi, another composer/musician who tried to make music that wasn’t self-serving but a conduit to serve others. Here a dance of imagined electronically-conjured instruments and physical percussion strikes ideas influenced by the music of Southeast Asia, rhapsodizing as panoramic compositions. Yuki’s idea of “environmental music” is so inspiring because it leans heavily on the latter part of the word.
Spacious songs like “響きの庭 Ⅱ ー凜凜ー / In The Garden II -lin lin-” and “花降る錦絵の街 / Utopia” take advantage of our sonic stereoscopic space to fill it with miniatures that build as wholes. The simple wind chimes of the former track segueing perfectly into an atmospheric melody (with a capital “M”) that combines assorted marine recordings and a truly memorable, cyclical mantra. Somewhere, you can hear breath in the distance – is it human or marine – and it seems of that same terra, building this track to resolve itself as it came in. As for the latter, repetitive motifs disassemble and assemble in myriad ways that call into mind Yuriko Nakamura’s most breathless neoclassical works (when sonic texture itself is more than an ornament).
As it stands, 水の迷宮 / The Water Labyrinth still remains Yuki’s sole work. As much I can research nothing else came of the publisher and their label after its release in 1991. So, it’s this same truncated ending that leaves me hoping that this story doesn’t end here. As you can see, hope springs eternal. And, at least for the moment, it seems, this important music lives on just as it began (flowing wherever it has to go next).