Hiroshi Yoshimura's Environmental Music Is Enchanting a New Generation
When listeners discover the Japanese musician and visual artist Hiroshi Yoshimura for the first time, the experience is often a revelation. 'I noticed how it activated everything,' said Dustin Wong, the experimental guitarist. 'It was extremely generous.'
Patrick Shiroishi, the inventive Los Angeles-based instrumentalist, called Yoshimura a 'god-level composer and musician who sits with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Vander and John Coltrane and Bela Bartok for me. They are so themselves.'
Yoshimura released most of his gentle and reflective albums of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, during the 1980s and '90s. A descendant of Erik Satie's furniture music and a cousin to Brian Eno's ambient explorations, Yoshimura's work put more of an emphasis on melody and warmth than its Western contemporaries. His compositions are often grounded by a soothing, vibrating hum underscoring largely electronic notes that fall like a pleasant weekend rainstorm. The spaces he created in his minimal, synthesizer-laden compositions allowed sounds from the outside world to exist harmoniously within the pieces. It's music that doesn't demand too much of your attention, but rewards close listening.
During his lifetime, Yoshimura remained a relatively obscure figure to those outside Japan. In recent years, his global audience has grown significantly, thanks in part to a series of reissues that have brought his music to streaming platforms for the first time. The latest, 'Flora,' arrived on Thursday, the first day of spring, in a fitting tribute to how devotion to Yoshimura's music and philosophy continues to bloom.
Many of Yoshimura's recordings were created to be played at specific sites, like the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, or inside a range of prefabricated homes. 'Flora' is a bit of mystery within his catalog. It was released only on CD in 2006, three years after his death at 63, from skin cancer. The scant information Yoshimura left behind about it included only its title, the song names and that it was from 1987 — the year after he released two of his most beloved collections, 'Surround' and 'Green.'
'It's really interesting to have a discovery like this album, where we truly don't know what the intention was,' said Patrick McCarthy, a founder of Temporal Drift, the label releasing it. 'Was it written for a theater piece that never happened? For a brand partnership that never happened? Just for fun? Were they odds and ends from 'Green' and 'Surround'? No one really knows, but it's clear that it was a statement as a piece of work.'
A sense of wonder pervades 'Flora.' In the 1980s, Japan's economic bubble and cities kept growing, but Yoshimura remained focused on the magnificence of our planet. 'Flora' is imbued with a comfort in how familiar cycles return each year, along with an astonishment of Earth's unexpected developments. When 'Green' was originally brought to the United States in the 1980s, the record label Sona Gaia Productions added unnecessary nature sounds in hopes of capitalizing on the growing market for new age music. But you can feel the natural world in every note on 'Flora.'
For the album opener, 'Over the Clover,' Yoshimura included flittering runs on an acoustic piano, adding rare exclamation points to an approach built on ellipses. The atmospheric 'Adelaide,' the LP's central and longest song, features synth washes that pull listeners in like a gentle tide before ascending beyond the clouds.
McCarthy and his Temporal Drift partner, Yosuke Kitazawa, have been part of four of the five Yoshimura reissues that have been released by multiple record labels since 2017. The pair met at the indie imprint Light in the Attic, where they built a relationship with the Yoshimura estate while preparing to resurface his debut, 'Music for Nine Postcards.' McCarthy and Kitazawa started Temporal Drift in 2021, partly to keep releasing Yoshimura's albums. 'We loved the music so much, and we wanted to continue that relationship because it did take years to develop that trust,' McCarthy said.
During the '80s, Yoshimura was influenced by Eno's ambient music, R. Murray Schafer's concept of soundscapes and the sound installations of Max Neuhaus. In his lifetime, he did not enjoy widespread recognition. 'This does not belong to the mainstream of the art world, this does not belong to the mainstream of contemporary music,' said Katsushi Nakagawa, an associate professor of sound art and sound studies at Yokohama National University, Institute of Urban Innovation. 'It belongs to the margins.'
But as contemporary listeners seek relaxing or meditative sounds, YouTube's algorithm has turned unofficial uploads of Yoshimura albums like 'Wet Land' and 'Green' into favorites with millions of plays. His track 'Blink' was featured on the Grammy-nominated 2019 compilation 'Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990,' put together by the musician Spencer Doran.
In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art's Kamakura Annex hosted a Yoshimura retrospective, which Temporal Drift is planning to bring to Los Angeles. That same year, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles hosted an event celebrating kankyō ongaku. Hundreds of attendees floated around the venue, experiencing performances in its theater, plaza and Japanese garden.
'At J.A.C.C.C., a concept that we generally try to explore with all our presentations is to blur the lines between the performer and the audience,' said Rani de Leon, its executive creative director. 'This music naturally fit into that sort of approach.'
Many of ambient music's landmark recordings have a connection to disaster or death, reflecting on what has been lost: Eno was inspired to make 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports' while hospitalized after an automobile accident, and William Basinski's 'The Disintegration Loops' became a Sept. 11 memorial. But Yoshimura's work provides an appreciation of what we still have.
'It's just about the moment, where you're at, wherever you are,' the guitarist Wong said. 'It reminds me of everything that's free, like the air and the sun and the wind.'
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