MUSIC

Following the release of his album trilogy (Kwaidan, Komachi and Kofū), Meitei has established himself as a defining voice in contemporary Japanese music. By sharing intricate sonic stories and impressions of his nation's rich culture, he has built an aural world around his notion of the ‘lost Japanese mood’. His latest project, under the new moniker Tenka, aims to work without the boundaries of theme, storytelling or audience expectations. Spending many hours in the mountain forests that he lives close to, his latest project Hydration explores the rich sensory pleasures of his natural surroundings, focusing on colour, sound, smell, humidity, touch, atmosphere and taste. “For me, making music is not a concept of enjoyment or pleasure, but something that becomes a part of my life, a record of my daily activities, like seeing something with my eyes or breathing in something with my lungs.” A lot of the music on Hydration was created back in 2019, but Tenka felt that there was something missing in the final delivery of the work. Eventually this led to a conversation with the Berlin based, Japanese born scent designer, Ryoko, in which the pair discussed collaborating on a scent to pair with the audio. Designed as a way to give the listener a deeper connection to their own senses and the experience of the music’s author, the combination of ollifactory and aural components connect a shared love of Japanese ecosystems and traditions. ‘I began to feel that in addition to music, there needed to be another essential element - and that it must be a "fragrance”.’ Hydration is available from September 14 on LP, CD and digital formats. The fragrance can be purchased directly from the Métron Records Bandcamp page and comes in a 10ml bottle of diffuser oil, great for home diffusers, as well as an empty 10ml spray bottle in order to create a body or room mist by mixing the oil with water (instructions included for best results). All customers who purchase the fragrance will receive a copy of the album on CD with a companion booklet with words from Tenka and Ryoko about the project.

On April 1, 2022, musician and sound artist Chihei Hatakeyama played to a small, reverent audience in the space formerly known as Commend in the Lower East Side of New York City. In the two long-form improvisations that evening, Hatakeyama maneuvered some well-traveled environments for those familiar with his near two decade career, layering guitar arpeggios in sheets of immersive reverb and allowing the music to generate, and regenerate, in spectral cadence. Later, Hatakeyama would share the inspiration behind the evening’s performance: a conversation with the imagined ghost of his younger self, during his first, and hitherto only, visit to NYC in the late 90s. An unspoken promise to return to the city and perform music was realized as a collaboration between present and former self. “Such emotional feelings abound in this live performance, colored by the time that has elapsed between who I was 24 years ago and who I am today. During the performance, I felt as if my younger self was standing beside me, as if a departed Jedi from Star Wars was speaking to me.” Live at Commend is the seventh volume of performances captured before a live audience at the Forsyth street venue in NYC. Recorded by Maxime Robillard and mastered by Hatakeyama, Live at Commend is available now in a small cassette edition and select digital configurations.

“Black Against An Orange Line” is an optimistic meditation. “At times these days I think of the way the sun would seton the farmland around our small house in the autumn. A view of the horizon, the whole entire circle of it,if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in frontbecoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as thoughit could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closestto the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orangeline of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is stillavailable to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark”

Muir and Caminiti are sick and tired of ambient music's bizarre entanglement with the wellness industrial complex. You know what we're on about here: healing sounds and soothing balms for well-heeled adult babies to jam on Instagram, supported by their aesthetic collection of verdant succulants (modular synth not essential, but preferred). And yeh we fully realize that the world's going to shit, but we're also pretty sure that a guided meditation isn't gonna lead us to salvation, especially when it's accompanied by music that's at best a poor approximation of private press biz that came out four decades ago. Growing up in California, Muir and Caminiti quickly developed a deep suspicion of this kinda snake oil peddling and on "Talisman" fabricate a charm to ward off fakers - a subtly fanged ambient-not-ambient dedication to desert doom, mountain jazz and lysergic experimental forms. The duo split the labor cleanly: seasoned improviser Caminiti handles electric guitar, and Muir works as a sonic alchemist, grinding Caminiti's takes into dust and subliming each note into a thick, vaporous haze. Anyone who's heard either artist's work before will have an idea of where to start, and there are traces of Caminiti's blasted earth recordings as part of Barn Owl, as well as his cinematic solo productions; Muir meanwhile picks up where last year's Ilian Tape-released "Mana" left off, orchestrating a mood that's bleak but not suffocating, and dark but not without cracks of light. The most obvious stylistic comparisons are to Seattle doom metal originators Earth - particularly 2005's country-fried "Hex" - and Norwegian maestro Terje Rydpal, who drove prog, jazz and psychedelic music into new territory in the 1970s and 1980s. Caminiti takes these touchstones and exposes them to the harsh Los Angeles sunlight, further drying out Earth's Pacific Northwestern blues and adding some neon flicker to Rydpal's icy, mountainous naturalism. He also admits he was soaking up pedal steel music at the time, and you can hear the trace of artists like Chas Smith, Daniel Lanois and BJ Cole in his recumbent riffs. A trained sound engineer who's spent the last few years refining his skills in Berlin, Muir looks to the GRM school for his direction, and employs subtle electronic processes, occasionally augmenting them with his own field recordings. This isn't just arbitrary birdsong to blithely suggest the natural world over billowing major chords, but evocative audio snapshots of the burning Californian landscape. It's these small touches that ground "Talisman" and provide it with a brawny narrative backdrop - the duo have created a record that's devotional and melodic, but one that never resorts to cheap tricks or well-worn manipulation. They've instead landed on a sound that's antagonistic but not annoyingly confrontational (we see you power ambient) or exhaustingly conceptual. Diving into one track or another is almost pointless, Muir and Caminiti assembled "Talisman" to be played in a single sitting - it's a mood piece that's unwrenchable from its essential whole. Listening is a chance to escape into another universe for a while, one that takes rough and rugged elements (Muir and Caminiti bonded over their love of contemporary death metal bands like Spectral Voice and Blood Incantation) and refines them into lavish sigils that suggest the confusing unpredictability of our era. Anti-ambient? Maybe.