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What does a home sound like? Rather, what should a home sound like? This was the quandary presented to Hiroshi Yoshimura in the spring of 1985. The late composer, who died in 2003, was a pioneer in a Japanese stratum of ambient music dubbed kankyō ongaku, or ‘environmental music’, and it was a question answered, emphatically, with Surround – Yoshimura’s domestic masterpiece, recently reissued by the excellent LA label Temporal Drift.
Largely unknown outside of Japan in his lifetime, Yoshimura’s work has seen a renaissance in recent years, particularly his 1986 opus, Green. Once obscure to Western listeners, it resurfaced via Youtube’s autoplay algorithm (a technical foible that’s also given second life to works by the likes of Midori Takada and Ryo Fukui) and was reissued to acclaim in 2020 by Light in the Attic (the Seattle label responsible for the Grammy-winning compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental and New Age Music 1980–1990 the previous year). Surround is more totemic still.
Listen to Surround, Yoshimura’s domestic masterpiece, recently reissued by Temporal Drift
Some background. As David Toop explained in his definitive book Ocean of Sound, ambient is characterised as ‘drifting or simply existing in stasis... encouraging states of reverie and receptivity in the listener that suggest (on the good side of boredom) a very positive rootlessness’. Grounded in the ‘furniture music’ – five pieces written to be played repetitively and indefinitely – of the French Impressionist pianist Erik Satie and Brian Eno’s pacific touchstone Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), a host of Japanese artists reconfigured ambient into a serene sonic pointillism ideal as a soundtrack to everyday life.
It was a movement shaped by the boom years of the early 1980s. As corporation coffers swelled, the government offered tax relief for investment in the arts, so retail and construction companies began funding ambient musicians to create ‘amenities’ for their products. The hunger for new-fangled tech and profligate resources meant it was embraced with abandon. Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono recorded Muji store soundtracks, while Takashi Kokubo’s 1987 A Dream Sails Out to Sea (Get at the Wave) was given away with Sanyo aircon units. Yoshimura himself was prolific: writing music for the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (1982’s Music for Nine Postcards); for a Seibu department store fashion exhibition (1984’s Pier & Loft); and a Shiseido perfume (Air in Resort, also 1984).
Surround’s genesis began in April 1985, when Hiroyoshi Shiokawa – who had met Yoshimura years previously when studying architectural acoustics – began working in the nascent Sound Design Office at construction firm Misawa Home. His initial task, he explains in the reissue’s liner notes, was to assess the sound installation and impact absorption of Misawa’s extant schematics, systemising acoustic data and establishing what the company called ‘Amenity 21’; utilising ‘wind, light, heat and other natural elements in the development of items that would enhance the living space’. A batch of fresh kankyō ongaku was an integral part of the plan.
He approached Yoshimura, who submitted the demos for Surround. Co-produced with Shiokawa and released in January 1986, it became the inaugural release in the company’s ‘Soundscape’ series. Around half of the 2,000 units were sent to Misawa’s dealers and showrooms; the rest were distributed via music stores, to which Shiokawa was compelled to act as a kind of sales rep, given Surround’s status as, effectively, a private-press record. The album became an ambient aficionado’s curio and, until Temporal Drift’s intervention, that was that.
But Surround is a revelation: a suite, wrote Yoshimura, ‘as close to air itself… and should be placed in the same family of sounds as the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup’. An organic mélange of field recordings and meditative synth washes – microscopic sublimations both impalpable and propulsive – it might be the defining work of the environmental canon.
Take the tactile opener ‘Time After Time’, in which arrhythmic wood-block loops and dawn-like sighs give the effect of a blooming entity; while the shoal of gossamer tones and light crescendos of the following vignette ‘Surround’ ebb and flow like winter tides. ‘Time Forest’, the album’s centrepiece, builds worlds with a minimal palette, Yoshimura painting Technicolor pictures with two notes, finding beauty in the spaces between the oscillating keys and glassy marimba. The closing highlight of ‘Green Shower’ might be one of the prettiest pieces of ambient music ever written, its flurries of synthetic panpipes and warm, tonally resolute cascades of melody and multilayered strings transcendent. For something so ascetic, it’s wildly nuanced; an encapsulation of Yoshimura’s own summation of his music, its ‘repeated recurrences and periodic cycles…transform the obscure spaces into a sound scenery full of kindness and refinement’.
It’s tantalising to imagine what your average yuppy would have made of this all, but the appeal is evergreen. Whether in the neon noise of the hyper-capitalist 80s, or the maximalist, politically upended shitstorm of our modern age, kankyō ongaku echoes our desire to find tranquillity and introspection in a relentlessly cacophonous world. Yoshimura’s practice was the perfect distillation of this: music, he wrote, that ‘permeates the air with sound but fills us with quietude. By enveloping a space with sound, it transforms into something prosperous.’ When that space is the home, an everyday sanctuary can become sublime.
For more information, visit temporaldrift.bandcamp.com
