Includes unlimited streaming of 『LIVE at SHISEIDO GALLERY』&『Music for ’70s Shiseido Magazine Ads』
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
With a minimalist style based on simple equipment, Japanese musician/architect H.Takahashi has been regarded as a legitimate successor to Japanese “kankyo ongaku (environmental music)” of the late 1970s and 1980s, like Hiroshi Yoshimura.
This new release from Kankyo Records is a compilation of two independent works he was involved with. Both are related to Shiseido, a Japanese cosmetics company with over 150 years of history.
It is a keen insight that a company that values beauty and wellness in life has chosen to focus on ambient music, a genre of music that is closely connected to our living space and that has experienced a quiet revival on a global scale over the past few years.
However, this work sometimes goes beyond such frameworks and sounds very adventurous.
This cassette work captures a moment in H.Takahashi's musical evolution and could later become an essential document in the history of Japanese ambient in the 2020s.
────
●KR-006:『LIVE at SHISEIDO GALLERY』
This album is his recorded live at the "7.28 AMBIENT NIGHT" held at Shiseido Gallery (Ginza, Tokyo) on July 28, 2023, with Jesus Weekend.
Jesus Weekend, a project by Seira Nishigami, made his solo debut in 2021 with the EP "Rudra no Namida. In 2023, "Murmurs" was released on Kankyō Records and became a long hit. She is an upcoming musician with a sound that crosses the border between ambient/new age music and psychedelic/progressive rock.
In this live performance, H.Takahashi introduces various environmental sounds, such as roaring wind and soft water sounds, as if stepping into a new world different from his conventional style.
This direction is a style that he has been experimenting with in his various live performances in 2023, and is somewhat reminiscent of Yutaka Hirose, a musician known for releasing an album on Misawa Homes Institute of Research and Development, along with Hiroshi Yoshimura.
Jesus Weekend, on the other hand, offers meditative, immersive, and intoxicating drones, harmonies, and vocalizations reminiscent of psychedelic rock and its new age counterparts.
These elements seem to have accelerated H.Takahashi's most recent musical interests and moods, and helped to lead him to the next stage of his career.
As described above, this source is filled with a large number of sounds compared to H.Takahashi's previous works, yet it has a subdued rather than colorful tone and a moderate sense of tension.
It is a work that stands out for its freshness in the contemporary ambient scene in that it is somewhat reminiscent of the emerging new age music of the 1960s and 1970s, a period that goes back a bit further than the era of the flourishing of kankyo ongaku.
●KR-007:『MUSIC for ‘70s SHISEIDO Ads』
This album is a complete turnaround, with functional and beautiful tracks that seem to have been sharpened in pursuit of what he considers to be the "kankyo ongaku" style.
This is a collection of tracks written by art director/graphic designer Yuudai Osawa for the installation "Aida ni Aru Mono - From Shiseido Magazine Advertisements in the 1970s".
Each track is full of universal charms, with a number of melodic hooks that sneak into the compact length of the piece, and somehow grab your heart as you follow the installation images with your eyes.
This is a must-have for fans of H.Takahashi's previous releases and listeners who have been following the recent Japanese ambient scene.
────
KR-006/7 is released in a 2 cassette set + DL code format. The subdued pink tone of the cassette body was inspired by the outer wall of the Shiseido Ginza Building.
This work is like a soundtrack of the city and the times that quietly colored the early summer of central Tokyo in 2023. We hope you will add it to your collection and relive this project, which will go down in Japanese ambient history.
supported by 9 fans who also own “『LIVE at SHISEIDO GALLERY』&『Music for ’70s Shiseido Magazine Ads』”
If you know my tastes, you know I love environmental atmospherics.
This surf & turf tone poem is by Tokyo trio Atoris, who counts the great sound artist H. Takahashi among its members.
Peep the visuals if you're high. Charlie Moonbeam
A combination of looping, spacial effects, and modular synthesis turns modern classical sounds into submerged, haunting ambient. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 20, 2024
supported by 7 fans who also own “『LIVE at SHISEIDO GALLERY』&『Music for ’70s Shiseido Magazine Ads』”
Reduced, simple sounds, reminiscent of minimal kankyo productions.
Slow + calming ambient with distinct patterns rather than all-encompassing fields. Karl Grundmann