Ever since I was a kid I’ve had trouble sleeping. I’ve had a hard time being awake a lot of the time too honestly. My mind has always been somewhat against me, and the only thing that has been a constant balm for my singed nerves is music. Basically every memory I have is somehow rooted into music; being nine and begging my nan to walk me down to the big Sainsbury’s so I could buy the Mmmbop single, bunking off college and tripping up to London with my best friend to go buy Give Up by the Postal Service, the first time I REALLY heard Chet Baker in the house of my girlfriend’s mother’s boyfriends house while he was writing a play about Baker’s life. Music teleports me back in time, but more than anything it also grounds me into the moment. When I’m listening to music I feel a part of the world, out of my body and it’s imprisoning mind, I feel something otherworldly.
I have always been one of those people that likes any and all music, as long as it is done well. I was an indie kid who loved dance music, Nu-metal, pop, jazz, electronica; my tastes sway with the current of my emotions; sometimes I need something loud enough to drown out my thoughts, sometimes sad enough to make me feel hopeful, energetic enough to get me out of bed, quiet enough to calm me down. Minimalism and Ambient is a genre — well a couple of genres, sister genres — that I loved before I even knew what they were. When I was like thirteen or so I made a seriously sketchy loop of the last few minutes of Incubus’ Aqueous Transmission (the last track on Morning View). After the main movement of the song is over there are several minutes of orchestral instruments with the song’s simple melody, played on a Chinese pipa, repeated over the top. On the original CD this slowly faded into ambient recording of crickets, something now lost in the streaming age. This song always gave me a profound sense of peace and was the only thing that I could drift off to sleep to for a long time. So I got a blank tape and with some creative start/stopping and rewinding of the CD — a much harder thing to do than is conceivable these days — I made a 45 minute loop that I could put on each night and sleep too.
This was all I had for a long time. I made a similar tape of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 after I finally discovered who wrote that song that was used to score sad moments in every TV show and movie for a bit. Life before Google was no joke. Without knowing exactly how to describe what it was that I wanted to listen to it took teenage me a long time, and a lot of help from my friendly neighbourhood record store, to even find the world of minimalism and ambient music. Skip forward a good chunk in time, brushing over the invention of Spotify and YouTube, and all the other new ways we can access music, and we are currently in possibly the best age for discovering music. Now, I quite literally have the whole history of music at my fingertips.
So now we come to the real point of this piece which is me exploring the depths of minimalism and ambient music, sharing my love for it as a genre, as an art form, and writing about the records that I love.
I’m starting with a record that has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years, especially in the west, and that is Hiroshi Yoshimura’s masterpiece GREEN.
I discovered this record the same way all great music is supposed to be discovered, through an impassioned email from a friend. I was talking online about some experimental computer music I had stumbled on when my friend Laurence sent me a message saying that, if that’s what I was listening to then, I HAD to check out Yoshimura. I trust Laurence’s recommendations without hesitation. We’ve been friends since secondary school and, despite moves across continents and long periods of silence, we have always connected through books and music, our tastes always seem to vibrate at a similar frequency. So I put the record on and immediately fell in love. From the opening rhythm of pulsing synth arpeggios that phase in and out like the sound of a helicopter being washed in and out on the tide — not the helicopter itself, its actual sound — sweeps you away into this new realm. Soft, delicately placed notes drift in and out beneath the driving rhythm with a sense of calmness, hinting at the deeper beauty that feels to almost out of reach, but if you sit with the sound, really listen to it, it’s richness rises to the foreground takes you by the hand and leads you into it’s world. From the opening track I knew this record was something special. I could hear The Postal Service, I could hear Four Tet, I could hear Jim Guthrie. My friend had done it again. 10/10 recommendation.
I delved deep into Yoshimura’s music, all I could find anyhow, and was transfixed by the subtle textures and melodic movements. GREEN is a bit of an outlier in his catalogue; the majority of his music has a delicate, almost wafting quality to it — he is considered the pioneer of a genre called Kanakyo ongaku, or environment music, working in a simular vein of Satie’s furniture music or Eno’s ambient investigations, and often draws the sounds of nature into his sonic compositions. His music would not be out of place in a meditation chamber or an art gallery (which, for example, Music for Nine Postcards was explicitly written for), but GREEN has a sense of purpose, a notion of movement, progression. It feels like a journey when you listen to it, evoking an enchanted forest where dust and leaves dance together in beams of sunlight peaking through the canopy. It’s enchanting, inviting.
While GREEN is still essentially quiet, gentle, and ambient at the core, it’s swirling movements of repetitious melodies weaving together in a trancelike mode, it has a more musical charm in the traditional sense. The only way I can think to describe it’s difference is that while Music for Nine Postcards was intended to heighten an experience of place — not to be distracting or obtrusive, but simply to enhance, much in the spirit of furniture music — GREEN feels like it wants you to take notice, it wants to be listened to, actively, ears open wide, to soak up the moment, and be a part of it.
GREEN has this miraculous power to mirror and mould itself to the listener, the spacial and emotional context in which it is being played. It sounds different through headphones standing in an open field after a thunderstorm than it does through speakers on a sunny morning at home. The music doesn’t change but it draws in the vibe of where it is played and amplifies it. There is a version of GREEN that has wildlife recordings peppered through it, birdsong and rainfall etc — in fact it was the predominant version in the US for a long time, marketed to the new agey folks — but now the original mix has been rereleased, sans nature sounds, as Yoshimura preferred by Light in the Attic Records. While I cannot imagine Yoshimura would have foreseen the invention of streaming music, the ubiquitousness of personal portable music devices (though Walkmans were already a thing in 1986, they hardly had the capabilities of Spotify etc) or the possibility of endless repetition, the structure of GREEN lends itself perfectly to these modern functions. We can now listen to it outside and allow the nature that surrounds us to diffuse into it, creating a unique listening experience every time.
I am yet to experience this record on vinyl, or any physical media for that matter, so I cannot help but wonder how the medium might alter the feeling of the music, but one of the things I love about it digitally is the fact that though each track is it’s own piece, the record feels like a whole composition built of movements, and when listened to continuously (with the ease of the repeat function) it takes on this otherworldly quality that exists almost outside of space and time, by blending into every moment simultaneously.
There is a sonic cycle built into the record. From the opening notes of CREEK we are exploring this enchanted forest of sound with energy, with purpose, and a bright tingly sense of wonder. FEEL has a sort of flurrying nature like fallen leaves caught in a spiral of wind, dancing with one another in a circle for a spell before dropping to the ground again before SHEEP leads us to a bright crisp pond. SHEEP is one of those pieces of music that just feels refreshing, like a big glass of ice cold water for your brain. The centre piece of the record is SLEEP. SLEEP allows us to stop and look around, to soak in everything we have experienced so far, before GREEN drives us forward again. The back half of the record is certainly more subdued. GREEN is just as bright as the opening tracks, but more laid back. The reverb is strong, drawing the notes out from their punchy origin into something softer, like a impact of a raindrop followed by it’s trail down the leaf. FEET, STREET, and TEEVEE follow in this mode with delicate melodies and heavy reverb until it fades out at the very end.
What I find so exciting about GREEN as a record is that each track also has its own power when looped. Repetition and looping is a cornerstone of ambient and minimalism music but, with the power of modern technologies, we as listeners can actually participate in this music, creating something new by simply pressing a button. Th centre piece SLEEP for example is what first introduced me to this power. SLEEP has this beautiful etherial quality to it; the synth sounds like woodwind in the mid range and almost like a meditation bowl ringing deep in the mix; then there’s a trio of high notes that ring out at the top like stars twinkling in the twilight. It’s peaceful, but never boring. Most of the tracks on GREEN are minimal in their composition — Yoshimura rarely plays chords, favouring the timbre of single notes ringing on and on — yet intricately layered and textured. On SLEEP none of the elements are competing for space, there is a silence in the moments just after the reverb dies, more an absence of intentional sound than a silence or rest, where you can hear the background hum of the Yamaha MX synth. Even in the nothingness there’s a sense of life, a warmth, it provides room for breath, for a calmness to wash in without feeling lost in the void.
I found personal solace in SLEEP so I tried removing it from the larger record by looping it. It is the perfect track to loop on nights when sleep is eluding me. Playing this track is like a lure for the spirit of sleep itself, it soothes with its gentle repetitions while never allowing itself to be zoned out entirely. The first time I did this I was reminded of my 45 minute Incubus tape, my childhood insomnia, and the beginning of the journey that somehow lead me to the moment of discovering this record. It felt like magic, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. That is why GREEN by Hiroshi Yoshimura is so meaningful to me, and why it felt pertinent to start this new venture by talking about it. There has never been a single occasion when I have second guessed listening to GREEN, in all the years I have been listening to it. It is perfect at literally any moment. It has the power to cheer me up, to calm me down, to energise me, to soothe my jagged edges.
I hope maybe this piece has inspired you to give the record a listen, if you don’t know it already. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments if you do.
Until next time
— NUCOSI
Definitely going to be checking this out.