Nowadays, there's been a growing trend toward the reevaluation of Japanese 80s ambient/new age musicians. This playlist compiles not only them but also electronica/drone artists in recent years.

Japanese Ambient/New Age/Kankyo Ongaku (環境音楽) on Spotify

Relive your favorite tracks from 2019, all in one playlist.

Replay 2019

Catalog: INNER164
Format: Tape Cassette // Digital // Streaming

Transparent Blue Tapes // 75 copies worldwide

Music for the Ninth Silence the first full-length ambient album by TOMC, is a work that speaks of "uncategorizable emotions and silence”, comparing them to the metropolis. The duration of all the tracks is unified at 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and each track is given a name based on psychologist Carl Jung's eight typologies and the places in Tokyo that TOMC recalls.

All of the music is produced with TOMC's electronic piano playing, with a nod to Hiroshi Yoshimura, Erik Satie and Steve Reich, and without sampling from existing music. The fusion of tones reminiscent of 1980s Japanese ambient / new age music and the three-dimensional sound textures of contemporary ASMR culture, free from the constraints of the grid, is a reflection of his vision of Tokyo.

The vibrant Japan of the 1980s is considered by many young Japanese people to be a fantasy far removed from the present day. On the other hand, much of the culture and urban landscape of modern Japan undeniably originates from the 1980s. TOMC, who lives in Tokyo, the largest city in Japan today, has been thinking about the "uncategorizable emotions and silence" that suddenly come to the minds of people living in the city, which is faced with various problems unique to developed countries and sometimes has to embrace a sense of stagnation, and depicted them in this album.

TOMC sees that ambient and new age music is not a form of "escapism" but an art form to connect the self with reality. When people who are in the midst of "uncategorizable emotions and silence" (i.e., you in someday) come into contact with the tracks and reclaim themselves, this album will be truly completed.

 This stage is on-going today, and is full of questions: What does it means to be oneself? What assumptions are accurate? What’s been an act all along? It’s a period of her life, and on the album, that’s deconstructive and lighter in tone. In its entirety, Yesterday & Tomorrow is deeply personal, but there’s a message for all of us to internalize: no matter how dark things get, there’s always hope. Even when you think it’s completely out of reach.

https://fanlink.to/ninthsilence

Music for the Ninth Silence

LIMITED EDITION TAPE

TOMC - Introverted Feeling (Nihonbashi)

Odezenne - Matin

Music for Nine Post Cards

Ice Copy

Persona

Choses nouvelles

Glissé redressé

Tujiko Noriko - Kuro (OST)
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Label: PAN (ENTOPIA)
Cat.No. PAN 89
Release Date: 26 April 2019 
Pre-order album: bit.ly/2TNq3yB / bit.ly/2F3mN9Q

Written and directed by Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko, Kuro tells the tale of Romi, a Japanese woman living in the suburbs of Paris with her paraplegic lover Milou. Tending to Milou by day and working in a karaoke bar by night, Romi reminisces about a time she and Milou once lived together in Japan with a mysterious ailing man named Mr. Ono. Weaving together personal history, anecdotes and myths, her stories soon turn ominous.

When we first decided to ‘split’ the film into what might be described as two parallel layers — the narrated story and the visual story — we found that it opened up an ‘in-between’ space, a space where what is heard and seen continually wrestle with one another. We envisaged that the true setting of the film would emerge from this friction, as something imagined and projected by the audience. After a few screenings we were struck by how some audience members would refer to scenes or events in the film that, for us, did not take place… We both thought of the music of Kuro as a score to this space in-between.

-Joji Koyama

Composed and recorded during the editing of the film in Berlin, the Kuro OST by Tujiko Noriko (with contributions from Joji Koyama, Sam Britton and Will Worsely), is a crucial and integral part of the film, acting not only as a glue to bind the layers of the film together, but along with the sonic palette of the film’s sound design, evokes it’s claustrophobic atmospheres and moments of haunting beauty.

I tried to think of the pieces in abstract terms, like moods and atmospheres. In a way, the process was quite similar to how I usually make music, in the sense that I have images in my head. Of course in this case there were actual images and a lot of them very close to me, but I didn't want to get overly conscious about them either—I didn't want to get stuck by trying to be too specific.

-Tujiko Noriko

The music, which in the film is largely heard in tandem to the narrating voice of Tujiko Noriko (who also stars as Romi), is presented and arranged here as a separate piece in its own right.

Written and produced by Tujiko Noriko. Mixed by Sam Britton and Will Worsley at Coda to Coda, London.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin featuring photography by Joji Koyama and layout by Bill Kouligas and Johannes Schnatmann.

ENTOPIA is the latest offshoot series from PAN seeking to amplify and redefine our ideas of what a soundtrack can be. The series will survey critical works across the spectrum from musical composers on PAN and beyond, commissioned for the worlds of film, art, performance, installation works, theatre, dance and fashion.

@tujikonoriko
http://p-a-n.org

Tujiko Noriko - Romi and Kuro (PAN 89)

PAN