For me, creativity is so dependent on surroundings.  Exterior attributes like temperature, sound and even smell, play a large role in igniting creativity.  Digging further personally, maybe it’s more ‘comfort’ that opens your creative mind.  What comforts you?  Does 73 degrees Fahrenheit do the trick?  The smell of a fresh-cut lawn?  Maybe the sounds of a Harold Budd album?  I have been out in the world and heard, felt, smelled, things that have triggered a memory.  If you ever run into these things, stop and make note.  Triggers will do more than transport you back to a book-marked event, they also leave your mind wide open to new ideas.

Stareside

Inner Citadel

Shortwave Memories

Shruthi-12

Akari is the third album from Tokyo duo Illuha. Following 2011’s debut Shizuku (12k1067) and 2013’s Interstices (12k2028), Akari takes the next artistic step for the band. While Shizuku was recorded in the US and completed separately by the artists, Interstices captured the duo creating their exceptionally detailed music together live during a Japaneses tour. Akari, in turn, is the first studio album where Illuha recorded and mixed together, throughout the entire process. The beautiful st-robo studio in Tokyo put a collection of amazing equipment at their fingertips, from vintage mics and outboard gear to a vast collection of instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Their writing sessions were numerous and long with details meticulously obsessed over for nearly a year. The result is the most bewildering music Illuha have created to date. An album swimming with the most delicately tactile sounds and instrumentation that draws the listener in with hushed, motionless attention.

While Illuha’s Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date are often drawn to the most sparse notes of Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, acoustic grand piano and guitar, the breadth of instrumentation is partially what makes Akari so abosrbing. They have succeeded in creating their own universe of sound, so beautifully recorded, where each element not only has its own space but connects and interacts so fluidly with the other sounds. It is as if they are placed perfectly by nature, the compositions are fluid and organic, a far cry from anything calculated or structured. It is this open space that the music exists in which in turn defines the music itself. There is ample room to breathe within this forest of gentle tines, bubbling analogue synthesizers, clicking percussion and quiet field recordings. This is subtlety at its most refined; hushed without being saccharine, distant without being morose.

Akari is the Japanese word for light. Conceputally the duo used this word as a guide, as if they were searching through the dark, trying to keep the light alive, as if one is cradling a candle doing everything in their power to keep it alight in a storm. It is this almost visceral sense of sheltering, of protection, that gives Akari a very human and personal sound whose intensely deep focus is as impressive as it is arresting.

Akari

Structures Based on the Plasticity of Sphere Surface Tension

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Structures Based On The Plasticity Of Sphere Surface Tension

Taken from the new EP "Noyaux" - out Nov. 6th  2015 on Morr Music.
Buy the single on iTunes: api.morrmusic.com/itunes/1044652779
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Benoît Pioulard: Noyaux

The melody of light is amazing, as if a real miracle has happened!

Miracle

Roee (sees)

From the album A Boat Upon Its Blood by Jason Sharp

Jason Sharp
A Boat Upon Its Blood
180gLP/CD/DL
CST119

cstrecords.com/cst119
jasonsharp.ca

A Boat Upon Its Blood

Jason Sharp • "A Boat Upon Its Blood (Pt 1)"

Despite his status as a key figure in the history of Japanese ambient music, Hiroshi Yoshimura's music remains tragically under-known outside of his home country. Empire of Signs – a new imprint co-helmed by Maxwell August Croy and Spencer Doran – is proud to reissue Yoshimura's debut Music for Nine Postcards for the first time outside Japan in collaboration with Hiroshi's widow Yoko Yoshimura, with more fully licensed reissues of Hiroshi's work to follow in the future.

Working initially as a conceptual artist, the musical side of Yoshimura's artistic practice came to prominence in the post-Fluxus scene of late 1970s Tokyo alongside Akio Suzuki and Takehisa Kosugi, taking many subsequent turns within Japan’s bubble economy afterward. His sound works took on many forms - commissioned fashion runway scores, soundtracking perfume, soundscapes for pre-fab houses, train station sound design - all existing not as side work but as logical extensions of his philosophy of sound. His work strived for serenity as an ideal, and this approach can be felt strongly on Music for Nine Postcards.

Home recorded on a minimal setup of keyboard and Fender Rhodes, Music for Nine Postcards was Yoshimura’s first concrete collection of music, initially a demo recording given to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art to be played within the building's architecture. This was not mere background music in the prior Japanese “BGM” sense of the word, but “environmental” music, the literal translation of the Japanese term kankyō ongaku [環境音楽] given to Brian Eno’s “ambient” music when it arrived in late 70's Japan. Yoshimura, along with his musical co-traveler Satoshi Ashikawa, searched for a new dialog between sound and space, a new way of listening: sound not as an absolute, but as something that interlocks with a physical environment and shifts the listener’s experience within it. Erik Satie's furniture music, R. Murray Schafer's concept of the soundscape and Eno’s ambience all greatly informed their work,  but the specific form of tranquil stasis presented on releases like Nine Postcards is still difficult to place within a specific tradition, remaining elusive and idiosyncratic despite the economy of it's construction. This record offers the perfect introduction to Hiroshi's unique and beautiful worldview: it's one that can be listened to - and lived in - endlessly.

Music for Nine Post Cards

Hiroshi Yoshimura (吉村弘) - "Dance PM" from Music for Nine Post Cards (EOS01) OUT 11/17/2017

The Senja Recordings

Berg

From the album "Tea Notes". All music by Jatinder Singh Durhailay & David Edren. Recorded january to march 2018 in Antwerpen and London. Mixed and edited by David Edren at ll150. Mastered & cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering Berlin.  Artwork by Victor Robyn. Vinyl + digital release on Ekster: 12th of September 2019: https://eksterlabel.bandcamp.com/album/tea-notes

Tea Notes

Jatinder Singh Durhailay & David Edren: "Shincha"

Harold Budd - Templar

Root Strata has closed shop. Thanks for your support over the years.

Please no demos or links.

Jefre & Maxwell

Harold Budd - Templar

Root Strata

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