After the brief, gushing and scene-setting opening, the second piece ‘Mirage of Memory’ from the Japanese producer Yuki Aizawa’s new album Whispers of the Distant Past sounds like an organ pastoral overlaid by threshing sounds or sweeping tides of static. Instead the artist – who is now based in Sapporo, a city known for its snow – is using guitar strums and swells of feedback plus more limpid field recordings of the rivers and wildlife found in Maruyama Park to hearken back to his childhood, and a core memory pulled from another part of Hokkaido in the form of Furano’s rolling fields of vibrant lavender.
Once harvested, lavender is stripped and rubbed but ‘Mirage of Memory’ just as well conjures the threshing and winnowing of wheat chaff as the piece evokes something of the Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard song ‘Now We Are Free’, that emotionally-laden Gladiator theme, stretched out and submerged by thick layers of distortion.
The sacred character of other tracks on Whispers of the Distant Past is more silvery and slender as lulling melodies burble away beneath gongs and chimes on ‘Under the Same Sun’ while those whistling and cooing airs, vaguely cherubic or seraphic, are punctuated on ‘Above the Treeline’ by springy, muted strums of guitar which act like a slack and yielding metronome. Up there from a height, those slack and springy strings sound like the chirping of crickets in tall grass, a Hokkaidan autumn landscape.
‘Soumatou (走馬ēÆ)’ – which indicates a kind of revolving lantern, the phrase an idiom for the succession of memories which flash through one’s mind – opens through a series of meditative sine tones, whose atmosphere oscillates gently but with a kind of enveloping warmth behind a patchwork of illegible chattering vocals. Again the effect is to lull the listener in through a combination of euphonic means and more discordant textural abrasions, with a chugging rhythm puncturing melodious whistles as Whispers of the Distant Past stretches deeper into the surrounding forest.
‘Still Dreaming, Still Living’ blends post-rock textures with smooth ambiances which briefly even suggest the loucheness of smooth jazz, as a kind of quavering, holistic heart remains present, a globulous and amorphous core which throbs and subtly changes shape at the very centre of the record. That sound which feels at once natural and synthetic – sub-operatic in so far as it seems to dwell on the cusp of words while effecting through its strings Aizawa’s dreamy reminiscences of his youth from the time of infancy – lingers into ‘Dazzling Light’ which is the album closer as well as its most propulsive composition.
Here the producer Aizawa embeds a motorik beat before finally like a celestial ship broaching some gilded horizon Whispers of the Distant Past is subsumed by the fond forgetfulness of frequency static. The album is one of two newly out on the Pisgah Forest label enmossed, with Syren by Gafael equally captivating, a vaguely dubby and faux-Homeric journey along the coastlines of Wales as the producer turns watery field recordings into extended chords of submergence and emergence.
(For more new music in this vein look to the vaporous rituals, lysergic ambiances and staticky terrains of the album Maidstone by Velv.93 or the doused and then inundated Kansai Botanicals by Deadbeat, who collected sounds in the countryside of Kyoto and at the former studio of the dye master Yusai Okuda which provided the basis for his work, which he conceived as one single piece. Those records are out now on the always engaging Belgian label Stroom and on the low-key and iterative quiet details).
