Hiroshi Yoshimura (吉村弘) – Music For Nine Post Cards (1982/2017) [Qobuz FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

Hiroshi Yoshimura’s classic 1982 album “Music For Nine Post Cards” available for the first time outside Japan. Yoshimura, the legendary Japanese ambient artist who passed away in 2003, originally produced Music For Nine Post Cards as a demo of music to be played in the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. It was recorded at home using a minimal setup of Fender Rhodes and keyboard.

Known among ambient and New Age heads for his serene, Satie-influenced sound—referred to as kankyō ongaku [環境音楽] (the term given to Brian Eno’s “ambient” music when it arrived in late ’70s Japan)—Yoshimura also made environmental music for runway shows, train stations and pre-fab houses over the course of his career.

The Music For Nine Post Cards reissue is the first release for Empire Of Signs, a new label run by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks and Maxwell August Croy of the Root Strata label. Doran and Croy worked with Hiroshi’s widow Yoko Yoshimura on the reissue, which features reproductions of the original art and liner notes, as well as new writings from Doran, Croy and Yoshimura. The label says more Yoshimura reissues are on the way.

Sometime in the middle of composing the songs that would become 1982’s Music for Nine Postcards, the late Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura visited the then-new Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo. He was taken with its pristine architecture, with its view of the trees in its courtyard from the interior. Yoshimura imagined his nascent work in relationship to that space, and inquired about having the finished piece played there; the museum agreed. The titular nine postcards, nodding back to that view from the Hara Museum, refer to a series of window views. In the songs’ titles, and in the few translated texts surrounding the release, he links them to broadly-drawn images of the natural world: clouds, rain, a tree’s shade. Ambient music is often linked to a kind of psychic interiority, but Yoshimura—who overlapped with the post-Fluxus contemporary art scene of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo—made music responding to and designed to exist in physical places: for train stations, runway shows, and so on. In 1982, a version of Music for Nine Postcards was the first release in Satoshi Ashikawa’s Wave Notation series; Ashikawa and Yoshimura defined and advocated for what they termed “environmental music”.

Tracklist:
01 – Water Copy
02 – Clouds
03 – Blink
04 – Dance PM
05 – Ice Copy
06 – Soto Wa Ame – Rain out of Window
07 – View from My Window
08 – Urban Snow
09 – Dream

Download:

mqs.link_HirshiYshimuraMusicFrNinePstCards19822017Qbuz24441.rar

Related Posts: