During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says. 

Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyō Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains. 

Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyō Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums) and Jesica Rubino (vocals, now his wife) released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition. 

Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.

Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within.

Pressed on heavyweight 180 Gram Vinyl with sleeve design by Bradley Pinkerton.

The Kyoto Connection - A1 - Memories From Japan

Tracks made for the Eevee Expo Jam 25, no game ever came out from the team but still produced this mini ost!

Got the Weight

2025 remix of our old classic ambient track including some additional instruments

Bora Shore 2025

From a series of (almost) daily ocean glimpses. The music is composed to a video of the sea (photons captured fresh every day). You can experience the full video version here: https://youtu.be/OrgQvYU1Vaw

Glimpse 1469 (Oct 10 2025)

bandcamp

Munir - All These Love

DC Promo Tracks #120: "North Sound" by Thomas Gray @twfgray is part of the upcoming release "Never Far Enough" on Black Wattle

Pre-Order: https://blackwattle.bandcamp.com/album/never-far-enough 
https://www.redeyerecords.co.uk/vinyl/90495-bwtl001-thomas-gray-

Sitting somewhere between a record for the dancefloor and a record for home, Thomas Gray debuts as the first release on new Sydney label Black Wattle. Growing up as a classically trained cellist, Tom turned to dance music as he got older and this is his first EP. Tom also featured on an Australian ambient tape earlier in the year, compiled by one half of Ken Oath Records founder DJ Earl Grey. 

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Pre-Order

DC Promo Tracks #120: Thomas Gray "North Sound"

It’s already been two years since Leonardo Martelli’s debut with the four-tracker Menti Singole. He has since been following the direction he took with this first release, at a rather slow path, releasing a lone and haunted mini-album, Previsto, in the meantime. With Menti Singole Vol.2, Martelli establishes a picture of his music, an update of his aspirations in the feminine.
 
Sparse, clear-cut and slightly nerve-racking, Micaella opens the record with the precision of a neurosurgeon. The song can be seen in many ways as a good introduction to the music of the Italian musician – past and probably future. Ethereal string machines balance the nagging acid leitmotiv: as often with Martelli’s music, there’s something going on in the background, some anonymous forces operating off-screen.
 
We can make the same assessment with Alice, the most obviously desperate tune on the record: the sad synth melody comes in as if it was trying to fill an emotional void, but the supposedly reassuring sentence is not complete, notes are missing. On Laura – just like with Alice – Martelli keeps on playing with the potential of abstraction of rap samples, a process we’re familiar with since Previsto.
 
Sofia gives a particularly striking example of this weird game he likes to play as Biggie Smalls’ words get progressively eviscerated from their meaning. Backed by bare percussive samples (a numerical metronome, copyright-free digital ersatz of percussions), Sofia depicts – without any artifice – despair in a post-industrial world, where everything has lost any sense of materiality – while Previsto was still set in a industrial world of steaming factories. Disarmingly simple, Menti Singole Vol.2 offers electronic mourning music at its most elegant.
Buy vinyl : https://bigwax.fr/fr/antinote/music/menti-singole-vol.-2

LEONARDO MARTELLI - ALICE

Fruit Merchant is back. This time offering up some fresh talent in the form of ‘Native Cruise’. With one previous release under his belt this year on Yam 004 VA. This marks Stoke on Trent’s finest first full length foray onto wax.
Fruit Merchant is super proud to offer up Native Cruise ~ Calypso Spring EP

Native Cruise:
https://www.facebook.com/NativeCruise/
https://soundcloud.com/nativecruise

Fruit Merchant:
https://fruitmerchant.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FruitMerchantMusic/
https://soundcloud.com/Fruitmerchant

Order

PREMIERE: Native Cruise - Japanese Fantasy Taxi [Fruit Merchant]

8 wants on Discogs. VG+. Generic Sleeve. 2 copies.

"Teenage Love" - Unknown B-Boy Cocktail 12" - France, 1990's

Three emotional years in the making, Be With and Efficient Space finally present Steve Hiett’s Girls In The Grass. Pressed alongside the long awaited reissue of his one-shot masterpiece Down On The Road By The Beach, these ten balearic soul instrumentals are of equal necessity; unrivalled beauty rescued from the fashion photographer-guitarist’s Paris Tapes (1986-1997). 

While recordings unintended for release should often be approached with caution, this is a rare case of unheard material being assembled as an indispensable and coherent piece. Girls In The Grass is something super special. The light and shadow that defines Hiett’s music is arguably more compelling here. It speaks to us in a language that feels profound, yet entirely comforting and familiar. 

Girls In The Grass reintroduces Hiett’s languid electric blues boogie, crafted on Saturday afternoons with fellow art director Simon Kentish. Kentish would cook, pour some wine and then utilise his arsenal of technology. He’d dial up a chugging rhythm, together with some ambient pads or keyboard textures, and anchor the weightless gauze of Hiett’s six-stringed touch. 

Hiett’s guitar sings with the same clean, crisp tone as Down On The Road, animated by a carefree weekend groove. Unlike his defining album which was boiled under pressure, these subsequent sessions have all the time in the world. The naïve melodies chart a missing link between Vini Reilly’s ventures into electronica and Booker T, sounding like sun-warped takes on wordless, fractured non-hits from his heroes The Beach Boys. 

Remastered for public pleasure by Simon Francis, these private moments are adorned with Hiett’s singular photography and feature typically idiosyncratic liner notes from Mikey IQ Jones.

Steve Hiett - Are These My Memories? (ES011/BEWITH062LP)

Eamon Harkin - Once Is Maybe Enough

Label run by @noise-in-my-head

Distribution queries:

Australia | info@noiseinmyhead.com.au
Rest of the World | www.wordandsound.de