Hiroshi Yoshimura (吉村弘)

Listening to Flora, which is from 1987 but wasn't released until 2006 (on a label for 'healing music'). It's predictably beautiful, using mostly piano. I don't think it quite reaches the highs of Postcards, Green or Surround but it has the same slowing effect. Currently available for a bargain (and vaguely suspicious) £222 on Discogs.

my local shop has a copy of Green on the shelf. I feel like I'm the only person in this town who would be remotely interested in it. so there's almost an obligation for me to buy it. the green vinyl looks so pretty, too....

I feel you are almost duty-bound to buy it. Albeit, imagine the good work it's currently doing in the community just being there?

A pal was watching some anime the other day and a DJ pulled out a record...

https://i.imgur.com/xL8xl3A.jpg

!!!!

bought it, listening for the first time, feel like I've been searching for this kind of music my whole life

outside of the Mario Galaxy game

synth bass on "Street" one of my favorite sounds ever

bought which one? yoshimura has lots of great stuff, and is in the midst of his own reissue campaign, state-side

I really hope someone reissues 1992's Wet Land sometime soon. For me it's his best work after Nine Postcards. If the CD credits are to be believed, it was recorded in one day, which is mindblowing because it's easily his most detailed and lush album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3m7HXeiHpg

Green - as far as I can tell that and Nine Postcards are the only two to be reissued on vinyl

that said idk how I feel about getting this kind of music on wax, even the slightest bit of surface noise is audible

Pier & Loft was reissued on vinyl too.

i love having these on vinyl but do agree about the surface noise thing.

yeah I've always thought it was weird when people said SAWII was their ultimate holy grail LP, if I managed to find a good copy I'd almost be afraid to play it. SAW85-92 otoh would probably sound nice with some light surface noise

SAW85-92 would sound good on any medium or environmental condition. if i had to provide music for the Little Mermaid, i would sub out "Under the Sea" for "Tha" and let it be barely audible down there, very muffled and waterlogged, and ursula would demand to hear more

I bought a vinyl reissue of SAW 82-92 last year and it sounded terrific

saw 85-92 sounds amazing on any format

idk I have plenty of ambient vinyl that sounds fine

listen mate life has surface noise

thread makes me want to go record SAW1 to a cassette tape, like god intended

Green rules

Always Be Checking (your tracking force)

well not always, idk what that post was about, sorry

used a stylus protractor the other day. Really started to wonder about my priorities

isten mate life has surface noise

SILENCE!

(and then the sound of your blood flowing)

inside my body n dat rite

where the real music is

well yeah

as ye were

wow the nature sounds version of Green is so bad!

crickets louder than the got dang music

was about to pull the trigger on a copy of Air in Resort but someone sniped it an hour before! ahhh!!!

that said, does anyone here own a copy? I heard the rather uh...unique packaging (it came in a green bag with perfume sprayed on it) causes the record to have some surface noise. I would guess there are some pristine copies out there but the average one on Discogs is probably not.

There's a copy on Discogs, shipping from France. It's listed for 125 euros but the postage is 3000 euros. So, uh wtf?

I don't have a copy.

i got a copy 5 or 6 years ago, for a very good price and it sounds just fine.

I got a copy a couple years ago before the pandemic made everyone lose their minds and start paying hundreds of dollars to try to relax to some j-ambient. it sounds pretty good.

Light in the Attic has some more copies of Nine Post Cards if you've been looking for one at a decent price

this man was clearly not human.

psa: wet land might save your life.

like there's music that's appealing or unappealing to the listener and then there's music that will... idk, sustain you?

i mean, the human body needs water in order to keep going. wet land feels like water for your brain. he knew exactly what he was doing.

wet land / nine post cards [TIE]
pier + loft / green [TIE]
soundscape 1
flora
four post cards
a i r

^how i'd rank the ones i've heard. i wouldn't rate any of those below 4.5 stars / 9.0 / highly recommended.

inhuman consistency.

also i keep waiting for robert smith to start singing about awkward things that happened to him in his dreams on "the sea in my palm." what a ridiculous jam.

more than anything else, i think the wider availability of his music in recent years makes a very good case for "environmental music" as a whole. it's easier than ever to carry a sound library in your pocket and his is some of the most dynamic, comforting, and universally appropriate.

Hell yes to all of this. Austin, you GET it. Wet Land is aural/spiritual sustenance and hydration.

I'm pretty much with you on the top-two tie but diverge on faves a bit after that:

Music For Nine Post Cards
Wet Land
Soundscape 1: Surround
Green
Soft Wave For Automatic Music Box
Air In Resort
Fora 1987
Pier & Loft

It seems like once a year some newly rediscovered masterpiece he made in the 90s rises from the digital ashes. About to listen to Quiet Forest (1998) for the first time...

Quiet Forest is great! A few of the tracks have... beats!? And spoken word!? But it actually works.

at last.

https://lightintheattic.net/releases/9919-surround?mc_cid=5a00095d02&mc_eid=982f43dfd8

woooooo

“If Surround can be listened to as music that’s as close to air itself, allowing us to enter each listener’s sound scenery, or as something that exists within a new perspective, expanding the middle ground between sound and music, and transforming it into a comfortable space, it would be much appreciated.”
— Hiroshi Yoshimura

:)

oh HELL yeah

hopefully this means others on the way too, especially Wet Land, which I think maybe was reissued once but you can't get it anymore

now to say a little prayer for the pressing quality. not that the others have been bad but music like this it's gotta be perfect

Surround is exquisite. I'd never heard it before, so thanks thread.

come to think of it just yesterday I did see someone write "the best ambient record ever made is gonna have a reissue announced tomorrow". so you should know there's at least one pesron who thinks this album is really great

very nice looking blue swirl edition here, not too many left though so jump on it :)

https://hiroshi-yoshimura.bandcamp.com/album/surround

Woah, good news. Hopefully, this means the rest are coming.

Call me a barbarian, and as much as I'd like the vinyl as artefact, I think Yoshimura is CD music.

*Four Post Cards* is the one I'd like next.

nah I mean I try to get everything on vinyl because I'm an idiot but Yoshimura's music is so dead quiet that yeah, the CD is prob what you want. except I don't have a CD player :)

I can imagine editions in the future bundled with a CD player. I see Temporal Drift are offering the Surround/Green/Nine Postcards vinyl set for $80. Yikes.

Soundscape 1: Surround is a close second favorite but Flora 1987 is my personal fave

that one has never been released on vinyl before because... it's totally CD music, yeah

probably right about these being CD music but i also don't have a CD player. saying that, the only OG vinyl i have is A・I・R (Air In Resort) and it sounds spectacular.

All on Bandcamp (including a cassette and CD version...): https://hiroshi-yoshimura.bandcamp.com/album/surround

(On Spotify too if that's your thing.)

i've been back listening to him a lot this month. there are definitely some second tier works for me at the moment - i find Flora a little over-chintzy at the moment - but it's all worth revelling in

my dog is currently completely blissed out to Surround. i think she loves Hiroshi Yoshimura even more than i do.

Got me all worked up thinking his discography was finally posted online in some official format. Oh well, more YouTube rips it is

omg how come none of you told me he wrote for Koto Vortex!!! no wonder those CDs are so expensive

someone create a poll of his albums. i don't know where to start.

Music for Nine Postcards is becoming a modern YouTube-kid/record nerd classic

I started with Green, but Postcards or Surround are also solid.

start with nine postcards: his most sparse, but the melodies and structure lay out most of the blueprints for what's to come.

Don’t think there’s a bad answer to that question

But I started with Green. Spotted at the shop and just kinda knew it was gonna be something I’d dig.

I wouldn’t suggest music for 9 as the starting spot (even though it was mine). It’s has his…. saddest(?) sounds. Beautiful record, but I’d say Air/Green are a good starting spot

would also recommend y'all to check out Inoyama Land which I think is a very similar but slightly more playful version of this sound

i adore Inoyama Land. H Hosono's production technique on Danzindan-Pojidon is out there but so effective -

Hosono built a special "Water Delay System" for the sound design of "Pokala", "Glass Chaim", "Mizue", "Meine Reflexion" and "8·31". Three speakers and a woofer are placed in the water (with rubber or vinyl covering) or on the water surface in a tank, the delayed sound is then recorded with a simple microphone and mixed together with the original recordings, so that the music sounds exactly like diving through the underwater cave on Inoyama Land.

yes! I think it achieves exactly what he intended it to.

unfortunately they don't have a super deep catalogue but the stuff collected on the recently issued "Commissions" comp is very good as well. they also have a fairly new one (well, 2020) which I think I'm going to order

crazy those guys used to be in Hikashu, a pretty weird punk/New Wave sort of band. a band which I just found out have way way more albums than I realized!

Live Archives 1978-1984 also very good.

I keep looking for someone copying what this guy did but have been coming up mostly blank. Listened to a Japanese ambient 80’s compilation with Hiroshi on and the other acts were good, but just not the same.

St. Mega (or whatever it was) had some nice hiroshi adjacent stuff in it

St. Giga, that’s what it was

would also recommend y'all to check out Inoyama Land which I think is a very similar but slightly more playful version of this sound

― frogbs, Tuesday, October 31, 2023 8:31 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

We got a thread

general Kankyo Ongaku / '80s Japanese Ambient - Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada, Satoshi Ashikawa, Yoshio Ojima, Inoyama Land

Can someone explain why his music was so obscure for so long and why is it all of a sudden getting re-discovered now, 20 years after he died? (Though I guess "all of a sudden" is a bit misleading, since this thread is three years old.)

Fwiw, I ran into music for nine online in 2013 as a “normal-not-crazy-online-music-nerd” and saw it sitting centre stage in a “BUY THIS COOL RECORD” middle of the record store location in a 2015 trip to Tokyo. No answer to your question, but seems like the dude has had a long rediscovery!

I’d boil it down to 1. The music really does speak for itself, it’s top quality, 2. Cultural wave of ambient becoming popular (“lofi beats”, “minecraft music”, “actual ambient becoming part of your none music lovers life”), 3. Dead + foreign mystique

His stuff is very accessible too. I’ve tried to explain the appeal of ambient to a (none music nerd) friend; basinski didn’t work, aphex didn’t work, eno/budd kinda worked? Hiroshi hit straight away. You’d have to be a pretty unreasonable fella/lady to not get some enjoyment out of Hiroshi

To try to answer the first part, I think it's probably a simple case of not being directly available in the West.

Most Japanese acts from the past, that we have been aware of, have had some sort of representation by their record company or some quirk of pre-internet exposure, like acknowledgment/enthusiasm in the press by a Western artist/musician for instance.

I'm guessing that traditionally, major labels in Japan have reasoned that we wouldn't be interested in Japanese language music unless it was so big and zeitgeisty that it could be worth a try to break that barrier, like YMO, but even YMO had brief and limited success. The language barrier was probably much more of an issue back then.

Funnily enough, a lot of the Japanese bands from the late 80s/90s that did get exposure over here seemed not to be on majors.

But this fails to cover wordless music, of course.

Looking back through Discogs I can see that Green got an American release in 1986 but none of the others made it outside of Japan, but then again, how many records were Windham Hill selling at the time? or how many copies of Thursday Afternoon sold upon release, so it could just be economics and reach.

God I love Thursday afternoon. Here’s a fun little blog on it

https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-thursday-afternoon/

why his music was so obscure for so long

i think it was known to a few people - i know Mixmaster Morris was talking about him in hushed tones in the 90s. But, until relatively recently few ears were focussed on the jewels in the Japanese electronic / ambient music canon. A few influential mixes plus Youtube algorithms plus Japan opening up to international licensing are probably the major factors in play as to why there was a huge acceleration of awareness.

Probably need to shout out Spencer Doran here - he uploaded vinyl rips of a bunch of HY albums to Root Strata's blog 10-12 years ago which is where I assume many of those Youtube uploads were sourced. And those first Fairlights Mallets & Bamboo and Music Interiors mixes were super-influential.

^Ahh I just hit "submit post" to say basically the same thing, but you beat me to it. Those mixes and the Yoshimura albums rocked (chilled?) my world in 2013.

I assumed that it was mostly down to the YouTube algorithm, which is generally how stuff like this explodes in popularity. I think that is how Hosono's Muji BGM tape also got suddenly very famous, even though Hosono himself says he really doesn't remember making it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34UutDrXV2Q

1.5m views on this puppy, plus one of the most bizarre comment sections I think I've ever seen on YouTube.

Of course I think it's not just that - I heard Yoshimura's name crop up a lot like 8-10 years ago, so he was always on my radar. But it wasn't until I actually saw the album in a shop that I was like, oh, it's *that* guy

I'm guessing that traditionally, major labels in Japan have reasoned that we wouldn't be interested in Japanese language music unless it was so big and zeitgeisty that it could be worth a try to break that barrier, like YMO, but even YMO had brief and limited success. The language barrier was probably much more of an issue back then.

maybe, though I think the vast majority of YMO's lyrics are in English! (outside of Naughty Boys where it's half and half) I think the issue for them was they were marketed in the Western world as being sort of a gimmick band that played into some stereotypes about Japanese people (which, to be fair, YMO were kind of game to play into themselves). I remember speaking to an older record store dude about them who says he definitely remembers them getting hype in the USA but they weren't really marketed like Kraftwerk or other electronic music, rather he spoke of posters with the Xoo Multiplies cover with text that says "They came from Japan...", as though they were space aliens.

of course the appreciation for them *now* seems to be a lot more sincere, and again I'm not exactly sure where it came from, but I think when it comes to Japanese electronic and New Wave pretty much all roads lead to one of the 3 guys (particularly Hosono) so there are dozens of possible answers.

I also think the rise of working-from-home has helped with the ascent of this stuff - it's on Youtube, but it wouldn't be something people would have actively sought out before. Now they're at home working eight hours daily and they don't have the background sound of the office so they search for ambient music that's pleasant and comforting without being distracting.

Mention of ‘Thursday Afternoon’ reminded me of this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funny_humor.html

paywall

Unhappy Hour By Wendy McClure
June 4, 2006
My boyfriend, Chris, and I were at Rossi's, an amiable dive bar where everything was burnished with nicotine. Except the jukebox. The jukebox was new, and with its cheerful, glowing computer screen, it looked like a particularly glitzy A.T.M. The music didn't come from CD's or records inside the actual jukebox but from an immense database somewhere on the Internet or maybe even outer space.

The place was filling up. Chris grabbed our pitcher and topped off the glasses of our second round. We paused to listen to the song that was just starting. It built up slowly — a low, swelling hum punctuated by simple, tentative piano notes. They went, "Ting. . .ting ting.. . ."

"Didn't someone play this song before?" Chris said.

We waited to hear more of the song. There wasn't more. Just ting and ting. And ting again.

"Before when?" I asked.

"Before, uh. . ." Chris put down his glass to think. So did I. We both got faraway looks in our eyes, spacing out, trying to remember. The song was particularly well suited for spacing out. Ting.

The last jukebox selection we could recall was by Pink Floyd, but that was practically a whole beer ago. This new song, we realized, had been playing ever since, steadily emitting an ambient drone and random tings for nearly 10 minutes now. It sounded like excellent music for floatation-tank therapy. Less so for Miller-Lite-and-video-game therapy, the kind you get at Rossi's.

Chris went and checked the screen. "Well, that explains it," he said. "It's a Brian Eno song." The song was called "Thursday Afternoon."

I don't know much about Brian Eno. I know that he is a highly innovative artist and a very important producer and also that in the 70's, he used to wear a lot of ostrich feathers. I would read later that with songs like "Thursday Afternoon," he was experimenting with what he called a "holographic" style, composed according to mathematical principles, in a series of repeated loops in which each component represents the whole. A whole that does not, technically speaking, rock.

Before long a girl approached the jukebox and peered at the screen.

"Is it stuck?" she asked no one in particular. "Or skipping, or something.”

She wandered off. The song wandered on.

I poured the rest of our beer. The TV above the bar had "Jeopardy!" on mute, and we tried to follow along. Chris visited the men's room. Chris came back from the men's room.
He said, "The song is still playing." Because it was.

People were turning in their seats to stare at the jukebox and then glance at the Michelob Ultra clock. I read the lips of a woman in conversation across the room; I could definitely make out the words "song" and "my God." The song had been playing for about 25 minutes, sounding exactly the same as it had when it started. Only somehow, paradoxically, worse.

Credit...Illustration by James Taylor
Two college-age guys came up to assess the jukebox grimly, as if they were inspecting a car for damage. "Who played this?" one of them said. "It's like yoga music or something."

They looked around, but out of the two dozen or so people in the bar, nobody owned up to playing a 20-odd-minute yoga song. Which, at this point, was getting to be more like a 30-odd-minute song.

"When's it going to play my stuff?" the other college guy asked. By now this seemed a hypothetical question. Elsewhere throughout the bar, there appeared to be considerably more fidgeting and peeling of beer bottle labels than usual. Darts seemed to miss their target more frequently. Ting. . .ting.
"Weren't we going to get dinner shumwhere?" I said, with difficulty. We were on our second pitcher of beer.

Chris shook his head. "We can't leave." Either he wanted to stay until the end of the song, or else the song was making it physically and inexplicably impossible for us to leave the bar, as in that Buñuel film where nobody can leave the dinner party. Imagine replacing the brass cylinder in a music box with a Möbius strip made from nerve endings, and you might get a sense of how "Thursday Afternoon" felt after 45 minutes. The mood in the bar was approaching that of a hostage crisis.

"I put 10 bucks in that thing," one of the college kids kept saying.

"This isn't right," said an older man near the bar. "This isn't fair."

Four male patrons took it on themselves to investigate the jukebox. They felt along the sides of the machine as if in search of a button or switch. We all watched. "Turn it off!" someone yelled.

"I'm not going to turn it off!" the bartender called out suddenly. Everyone turned to look at her. The room fell silent. "Someone paid money to play that song. So they're gonna get their song," she said, bitterly. "You think I like it when you guys play that head-banger stuff?"
Ting. . . .Ting. The men stepped away from the jukebox. If "Thursday Afternoon" was to last all night, so be it.

After an hour and 50 seconds, the tings tapered off, and then the synthesizer drone ceased. And then a moment of heavy silence, and then scattered applause throughout Rossi's.

We all looked back at the jukebox. Any Song, the screen read. Any Time.

That’s so great. The gym I went to for 6 months had a thing like this and I cued a 1hr of silence track on Spotify because I hate listening to music in the gym lol. Turns out I ruined the whole system, they got rid of the request a song feature exclusively because of the asshole that played hours of silence lol

I was typically the only person in the gym when I did this (small gym, I went at weird hours). I didn’t realise it got added to a playlist until after I started doing it in my defence!

been using his music to get my 6 year old daughter to sleep and it works so well. like in 2 minutes she'll be out. and if I'm not careful I'll fall asleep too.

xp May have told this story before but my friend and I queued up "Too Long" by Daft Punk several times in a bar that was fool enough to have Discovery on their jukebox. I don't think we even got through one listen before the staff skipped to the next song

I think the online Touchtunes ones won't let you play the same song on repeat anymore. or if you do it'll skip them or move them back to the queue or something. it definitely does that if you play a bunch of songs by the same artist.

the one time I got skipped was when I played both versions of "Yeah" by LCD Soundsystem in a row, which is like over 20 minutes in total. it was pretty funny because people were getting upset at the first version for being too long and repetitive, then it stopped and I heard someone go "ok FINALLY" only for the 12 minute remix to kick in, which led to a bartender actually unplugging the jukebox because she didn't know how to skip the song

speaking of LCD this one bar I used to go to had some kind of automatic volume adjustment on their jukebox depending on how loud the actual music was. I think the idea was that recordings from say the 70's or 80's are pretty quiet compared to brickwalled modern stuff and you want them to play at the same volume. but it was a dynamic adjustment so the quiet bits on songs would be very audible. anyway someone (not me) plays "All My Friends" and that beginning piano intro was so loud that it was kind of physically disorienting. like I'm used to shouting through music but those clanging atonal piano chords just stopped all the conversation in the bar. and it felt like it went on forever!

Got away with playing all of “The Diamond Sea” (LP version, not the extended one) in a sports bar in Harrisburg, PA once and it seemed like hardly anyone even noticed.