With Kankyō Ongaku, Light in the Attic Records has carefully and diligently crafted the most enjoyable compilation of 2019. Kankyō Ongaku, which directly translates to “environmental music,” is a compilation of ambient environmental music by Japanese musicians from 1980 to 1990. The album was compiled by Light in the Attic Records and was officially released on February 15 of this year. The CD and Vinyl release versions of the compilation contain 23 songs and a book that details the history of Kankyō Ongaku and the musicians involved. Many of the songs available on this compilation are nearly impossible to find online, so it is clear that countless hours went into the process of finding and licensing all of these songs. A small zine focused around the life and history of Japanese electronic music pioneer Haroumi Hosono shipped out with the physical releases as well.
The actual style of Kankyō Ongaku is heavily influenced by Erik Satie, Brian Eno, and John Cage. It relies heavily on natural sounds and samples to create and enhance natural musical idiosyncrasies. The kind of music featured onKankyō Ongaku took off as an accepted style in the early 1970s with much of that credit due to the rising popularity of minimalism and ambient music pioneered by Brian Eno. To Brian Eno and many of the Japanese ambient pioneers, ambient music meant the restructuring of the relationship between the listener and music. The sonic idiosyncrasies that lie in the natural world were no longer flattened, rather used and enhanced in order to bring about some of the most emotionally evocative music of the 1980s.
Some of the standout musicians on this compilation are Ashikawa, Yoshio Ojima, Midori Takada, Haruomi Hosono, and Hiroshi Yoshimura, whose albums Green and Air in Resort have been on my napping playlist for the past two years. Kankyō Ongaku owes much of its popularity and credit to Haruomi Hosono, however. Hosono, of new-wave synthpop group Yellow Magic Orchestra, took to ambient music as a breather from the group. Hosono was also heavily influenced by Satie and even compiled a collection of interpretations of Satie’s works in 1984. In an interview in the zine, Van Dyke Parks talks about his experiences with Hosono in the 1970s, and describes Hosono as someone who had an established style that combined Western musical ideas with traditional Japanese sensibilities.
“Nemureru Yoru” by Hideki Matsutake, one of my favorite tracks on the compilation, features calming synths and incredibly well-integrated samples that keep the listener on a cloud for the entirety of the song. Matsutake, the unofficial fourth member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, was heavily influenced by Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach at a young age and began using synthesizers as his main means of music production shortly after. Every element of “Nemureru Yoru” is meticulous and purposeful. The ethereal synths sit atop samples of wind, and a pulsating bass note drives through the song along with samples of distant train sounds. Sounds of water rushing and dripping are also edited and integrated into the song in a heavily evocative way that serve to “highlight idiosyncrasies” in the words of Brian Eno.
A review of this compilation wouldn’t be complete without talking about one of my favorite musicians and personal heroes, Hiroshi Yoshimura. Available on the compilation is “Blink” off his sensational 1982 album, Wave Notation 1: Music for Nine Post Cards. Yoshimura, a pioneer of ambient environmental music and performance art in Japan, was integral to the establishment of Kankyō Ongaku. Yoshimura was a prominent figure in the Tokyo art world and wrote music that aligned with the fundamentals of Kankyō Ongaku as early as 1973. “Blink” was a perfect choice for the compilation as it highlights all of Yoshimura’s signature devices. Tranquility is always a focus in his work, and the droning, oscillating soft-synths that sit below the keyboard melody on “Blink” are no different in this regard. Wave Notation 1: Music for 9 Postcards has received international recognition for years, but his real gems lie on Green, Air in Resort, and Quiet Forest, where real samples of rivers, winds, and birds are integrated in his signature calming style which Light in the Attic Records uses the Japanese word “shizukesa” to describe.
With New-age electronic music making a comeback in the past year, it is critically important to pay attention to the pioneers of the genre. Kankyō Ongaku is important for more than just the music however. These composers highlight and put emphasis on the natural world in a way that is more important than ever for us to realize and appreciate. Brian Eno describes it as a “highlighting of idiosyncrasies,” but a simpler and more direct way of explaining this theory is to focus on the relationship between not only the listener and the music but also the listener and the natural world. The relationship between the listener and the natural world is the reason why the music works in the way that it does. It is imperative to think of Kankyō Ongaku and the composers who founded the genre as a form of environmental activism and activists, respectively, both in the 21st century and for the future.
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