On the opening song and lead single from Ayane Shino’s new album River せせらぎ (The Timbre of Guitar #2) the guitarist conjures a lovely warm tone which manages to blend some of the angularity or circuitousness of say Mary Halvorson with the wide vistas and welcoming openness of a Bill Frisell or Julian Lage, as spectral howls and chimeras animate the closing moments of the piece. ‘The Backstroke’ is a winning reinterpretation of an original composition by Rei Harakami, from his breakout album Red Curb which was released back in 2001, managing to transmute its wistfulness and gauziness and even a certain aquatic muteness into something more tranquil, like the noise rock of Boredoms at its most meditative and cyclical as on ‘Super Shine’ from their standout Super æ.
Born in Hiroshima and based out of Kyoto, the producer Rei Harakami was part of a new generation of electronic musicians in Japan who seemed to have been influenced as much by the environmental genre kankyō ongaku and the ambient works of Hiroshi Yoshimura or the minimal techno which had been compiled by Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus as Basic Channel than they were by more popular strains of contemporary dance music.
His debut album Unrest which arrived in 1998 on the influential Japanese techno label Sublime Records was playful and soulful, echoing some of the rhythms and headspaces of electronica and downtempo, while its successor Opa*q – which also relied on his trusty Roland SC-88 sound module and was released the following year – felt at once more up-front and outgoing, continuing to showcase his affinity for jazz and Detroit techno while also exhaling a vaporous form of IDM. After the acclaimed Red Curb in 2001 his growing fanbase had to wait four years for new music, with [lust] in 2005 often regarded as a summation of his work to date while pushing in new directions as Harakami incorporated vocals and strings. He subsequently turned to soundtrack work and released music with the celebrated vocalist Akiko Yano as Yanokami, before his sudden death in the summer of 2011 at the age of just forty years old from a brain haemorrhage.
Some of his earlier compositions seem to parallel or prefigure the glitchy textures and naif or childlike melodies which were more pronounced in the works of acclaimed early-aughties electroacoustic artists like múm, Notwist and The Books. Shino however eschews Unrest and Opa*q to pick up the thread with Red Curb, an album which Harakami approached with a renewed sense of freedom, at one point even intending to retire as a producer after the record’s release.
With its spindly, reversible keys and burbling pitter-patter which almost coheres as handclap percussion, until a few frazzled cymbals herald a more propulsive and dance-oriented second half to the piece, ‘The Backstroke’ lays down an early marker on Red Curb, which abounds in wistful melodies over tumbling breakbeats. Listening to the album an array of musical connections come to mind, but at the foreground are the Low scene-setter ‘A New Career in a New Town’ which features Brian Eno’s spare piano and synthesizer plus a bluesy harmonica solo from David Bowie plus the Smashing Pumpkins nostalgia hit ‘1979’.
In fact Harakami’s productions are well suited to the solo guitar setting, given the strength of his melodic lines, their looping themes and his use of pitch bending which the guitarist can replicate while summoning an array of microtones and overtones, which Shino handles to her advantage on her rendition of ‘The Backstroke’ before the wiry strums and hammers of the closing section. On the other hand her take on the [lust] closer ‘First Period’ is more conventional or straight-ahead, as she dwells on the song’s underlying melody and tempers its wooziness for a fond evocation of schoolyard days.
[lust] remains Harakami’s most cherished album, and she covers its brief opener ‘Long Time’ before staking out ‘Joy’, his signature piece, arriving through a process of persistence and repetition at the ebullience of the original, before the pings and pulls of her six-string start to punctuate the burnished routine. ‘海1 – umi1’ is from Harakami’s soundtrack to the 2007 live-action adaptation A Gentle Breeze in the Village, imbuing that tangle with the rattle of a Western, an atmosphere which she maintains through her take on the Red Curb title tune whose dreamy tones and meandering melodies make the song a fine fit for the guitar, as Shino for the most part waysides its zagging beats.
Harakami on the [lust] title song and ‘Come Here Go There’ showed a more lustrous and late-night side to his production, which by this stage in his career had gained new polish and depth. Shino on ‘Last Night’ captures a kind of nocturnal duskiness, while ‘さようなら – Sayounara’ from the rarities collection わすれもの Wasuremono carries the emotional heft of flamenco guitar, evening-clad and sounding like a somewhat forlorn but insistent serenade. River せせらぎ (The Timbre of Guitar #2) closes with another short and beautifully languid piece from the Gentle Breeze soundtrack then a take on its song-length closing sequence ‘River’, which Shino wrangles with understated flair as the rippling ribbons of her guitar provide listeners with a winding and heartfelt sendoff.
It has been a good few months for fans of solo guitar or adjacent kinds of expression, with exceptional records by Bill Orcutt and Luciana Bass at the tail end of last year followed by new or impending projects from Nina Garcia, Klein, Joseba Irazoki, perila, Cameron Knowler, Walter Zanetti and Hayden Pedigo among others. Ayane Shino was brought into the Sublime and Musicmine fold by the producer and executive Hideoki Amano, commencing her ‘Timbre of Guitar’ series in 2021 through the release of six songs in tribute to the ambient musician and deejay Susumu Yokota. Engaging deeply with Harakami’s catalogue after first encountering his music at university, where she also developed a passion for the works of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Oneohtrix Point Never and Steve Reich, the guitarist says of her latest release:
For this album, I succeeded in spinning some exquisite, silk thread-like delicate tones, interwoven with human warmth, gentleness and simplicity. And I was also able to rework Rei Harakami’s distinctive sound with a floating feel to it and transform it into a very classical guitar sound. I hope many people will be able to receive this group of sound that I created in this album that I played with all my heart.
