WATARU SATO — FADING SPACES

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Taking cues from Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds — and studying under Lubomyr Melnyk — ‘Fading Spaces’ by pianist Wataru Sato is inextricably gentle. It begins with meandering touches of the keys, the spaces between poised like unformed thoughts, before a voidsome chasm opens up into the heroic ostinato at the heart of ‘Fading Spaces’.

This spiralling melody is the form to the track’s introductory formlessness, and is marvellous in its ambivalence — it reaches to optimism, but remains a hair’s breadth from it, almost descends to despair, but lifts off before it falters. There are options here, different pathways as if nothing is finite.

With an exploratory volta in the middle that sees bright variations tumble out from Sato’s fingers, a fervent flash of possibility, the piece purposefully, heavily returns to where it began, a vista of decisions ahead.

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• 🔔 ‘Fading Spaces’ is taken from Sato’s Spaces EP, out now on fledging label 1magine (part of the Disk Union family). You may purchase and/or stream it from a variety of places.

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CHRIS OTHER — NEW MORNING

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⌾ LISTEN TO NEW MORNING BY CHRIS OTHER ⌾

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As if whirring into being, ‘New Morning’ by Brooklyn composer Chris Other certainly feels like a beginning. Hushed room ambience sets the scene, like dust dancing in the air between shards of light lancing in from curtain cracks. Then again, with its greyscale tones and the sheafing sounds throughout, this could be a rainy morning. The piano is tentative, reflecting a gentle awakening of the senses after sleep — the touch of bare feet on floor, a pre-glasses glance around the room.

The title ‘New Morning’ does not necessarily equate to a “good” morning; this morning is new, signifying a starting afresh, putting something something behind its sunrise. The textured mechanics that Chris Other puts into this track does summon that feeling of timeworn memory, a tenderness. Or else it is the biological analogue to hearing an old PC jolting awake — fans cut the still air, processors creak, something beeps, just as a body lurches slowly into life.

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• 🔔 'New Morning' is taken from Chris Other's Til We Feel That Hope Again EP, which is out today (23rd April). You can stream the release or purchase it digitally from Bandcamp.

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AKB — SAKTMODET

⌾ LISTEN TO AKB, SAKTMODET ⌾

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Though it's possible to be fooled into thinking that AKB is a thinly veiled tribute to J-pop megagroup AKB48, it simply spells out the initials of Swedish musicmaker Anna-Karin Berglund. Names aside, her track 'Saktmodet' (loosely translating to "gentleness") is a gloriously organic, living-and-breathing piece of ambient music.

The song is a crooning collection of woodwinds, and the crash of resonant, lightly phasing piano (reminscent, in texture at least, of 'Canticle' by English band These New Puritans). It came to life while working on her 2020 album. Marianergraven, which was more focused on "mechanically profound sounds and sound worlds."

"This song," Berglund tells yes/no via email, "was a respite to work more with traditional instruments like piano and clarinet."

'Saktmodet' is an illustration of hot and cold: sharp, icy sounds ping out, and there's the accidental rustling and whispering of breath, all cushioned by rich, warm sounds of the clarinet and the fading, post-percussive glow of piano chords. More than temperatures, however, more than indoors and outdoors, it's the vital, close-at-hand feeling of the instruments that give this slice of ambience a real sense of human effort and emotion.

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• 🔔 'Saktmodet' arrives via Swedish label Lamour Records, originally featured as a bonus 7" bundled in with AKB's limited edition Marianergraven. You can listen to the track on Spotify, if you like.
• 🔔 If you want to hear more from AKB, it's possible to stream and download Marianergraven from Lamour Records' Bandcamp.

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🐣 THE EARFLOWER EXPERIMENT — PASS(H)ERBY

Something steeped in humidity here actually turns out to be the perfect soundtrack to watching the snow fall (the UK is currently wrapped in a frosty Siberian weather front). The blissful soft snowflake sounds of the hank drum employed in this track by Indian artist Astaaq Ahmed aka The Earflower Experiment – tuned in the cheerful key of C, he tells us via email – ping and pong with a soothing pace and texture. ‘Pass(h)erby’ is like a panacea, a gorgeous weave of textures, the cradle of bristling rich percussion that arrives, the warm waves of synth that waft in resolutely, the sparkling deep-breath lead synths.

“While conceptualising this song, I was mostly concerned with trying to capture the essence of a constantly moving, fast-paced world,” says Astaaq. “There are things happening in our lives on a regular basis, but our stories, in the larger scheme of things, don’t have any impact on anyone but us. The world is blissfully ignorant of your happiness, anger, pains and sorrows, and it just keeps spinning.” And this track has that motion, the gently unrelenting beat that fades into a lullaby on a patchwork of chirruping night insects: the heartbeat of your panic and pain as ignored by the natural world. And how fine that is, how ok the world is even after tragedy, how this track comforts you.

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• 🔔 This comes from The Earflower Experiment's An Anecdote EP, which Astaaq tells us "tries to convey the life cycle of a rather unfortunate relationship."

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🐣 EMMIT FENN — FEATHERS

The cyclical nature of this, the mid-level arpeggio of the left hand, the gentle piano paints a picture of cool melancholy, chilly and lonely, the melody expressing a certain amount of distress in its ascending refrain, its title 'Feathers' suggesting a fragility that is certainly effused from this brief piece of music, allusions to hesitation and hang-ups in its subtle slices of tempo rubato, all of it light, never heavy or strong, a floating atmosphere like feathers fallen from a bird now flitting in the air, the broken beauty of that vague loss visible in the song's delicate nature.

Created by California-located pianist and composer Emmit Fenn, 'Feathers' is very filmic. It conjures images of stark angular buildings on a night sky, no nature but cold clouds and the birds who fly under them from rooftop to rooftop, dropping feathers like snow across the anonymous cityscape. There is the feeling of being alone here, of looking out across a sea of souls and being distant to every single one of them, the baroque changes to minor chords and its fluttering trills reflecting a sense of teetering despair, calm and soft but inwardly harbouring a streaming cycle of doubts and worries.

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• 🔔 Recently Emmit Fenn released his Prologue EP via TH3RD BRAIN. You can listen to it on SoundCloud if you want.

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AMACCHI – A MATTER OF TIME

Stumbling across something nice and new and unexpected is the point YES/NO. Yeah I write about music I like regardless of how un-new or un-undiscovered it might, but the original point was to find new stuff and write about it, hopefully introduce some people to something fresh to listen to.

And with that word – FRESH – in mind, this is 'a matter of time' by amacchi. Who or what is amacchi? Apart from a somebody that makes music, I can't tell you much else. But with freshness being the keyword now, let's leave history and backstory and every other story and focus on the song – this fresh, fresh song.

From its delicious and raw acoustic guitar sounds rippling throughout this instrumental track, sounding as if a guitar were being plucked and played right in the room with you – complete with outdoor sounds of maybe children playing or something... so maybe its better to say that instead of being in the room with you, you're outside, wherever these sounds were lifted from, chilling and enjoying the time passing by in such gentle ways.

☟☟☟☟☟☟☟☟

So yeah, from that, to the wonky synth decorations, breathy and urgent vocal samples whispering in your ear, to the plink-plonking beeps that gradually grow fizzier and fizzier, leading us into a final section of the track dominated by the slow undulating rumble of sub-bass, all of its ornamentations – and that's not even mentioning the luscious beat with its hi-hat skifflings and grittily crunching clap-snare-thing.

FRESH was the word and is the word and it is closely followed by beautiful and moving in a small, everyday way – not to say that the song is everyday, but rather that what it seems to be celebrating... joy, well not joy (note the slightly end-of-the-day feeling) ... the contented awareness of everything around you: simply BEING. It takes cuteness and mixes it with that vague sense of the limits of being alive, mixes lightness with deeply embedded seriousness. That's what I'm taking from it anyway. A matter of time indeed.

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• Seems amacchi is part of the Fan Service Collective, so you should probably check em out if you liked this.

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MUS.HIBA – SLOW SNOW

Never before has a song sounded so much like its title. Well maybe it has but anyway… This is 'Slow Snow' by mus.hiba and yes, it basically sounds like slow snow. It is a delicate and gentle song, artfully spanning the four minutes of its existence with a snowscape of sound, a soundscape of snow; it falls from the evening sky in slo-mo spirals, highlighted in streetlights that grace the already fallen layer of snow on the ground – no one is around in the frozen streets. It sure does paint a picture.

The track is all set to a slow and carefully considered beat that summons the laid-back style of southern hip hop and trap, giving substance to the hugely expansive synths that satisfyingly dip in volume with each heartbeat kick. Dancing with these synth chords are piano melodies and clusters of gravity-defying glockenspiel, chiming evermore towards the end of the track.

On vocals it features not an actual person but one of the voices or even personalities taken from voicebank freeware UTAU, called Yufu Sekka, the gentle sounds of whom whisper like breezes in the synthetic snow-swirls of mus.hiba's production. Using this hyperreal technique, mus.hiba has created an entire album of music centred around themes of snow and winter, "to express the fragility of a two-dimensional character singing." I very much like this idea. Top marks.

• The album is called White Girl, it is scheduled for release 10th December (suitably wintry) on the Japanese Noble Label and it will be very, very beautiful if 'Slow Snow' is anything to go by. Go buy it here.
• Also check out the fragmented prettiness and gradual intensity of the other song released from the album so far, 'Moonlight' ♥
• Fun fact: Yufu Sekka = Yufu, ユフ, inverse of fuyu (winter); Sekka, 雪歌 ("Snow Song") – so there you go.

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KIDKANEVIL – INAKUNARU FT. PHASMA

Last time I wrote about Kidkanevil, it was to do with this madly bristling tree-laden remix of Polish producer UKU's track 'Forest 5 am' – further detailing the UK-based Kidkanevil as a master of glitchtronic atmospheres, of delicacy and dynamism. Not that his part in Kidsuke, the collaboration with Japanese glitch king Daisuke Tanabe didn't show off his talents well enough – it's just nice to hear new stuff with his mark on it.

Speaking of which, did you know that Kidkanevil has a new album approaching? Well if you didn't, you know now. And because of that, there are a couple of songs floating about in the digital sphere – new songs that are very good. One of these is the gloriously addictive 'Inakunaru', in which Gerard Roberts – Kidkanevil's name irl – shares production & creation duty with Yokohama-based Phasma. This is the subject of this post.

Now I've been having a bit of trouble translating 'inakunaru' – literally it means something like "be not here" or "not being here" or "being absent" and I guess in a way "disappeared"; on the other hand I google translated it and it gave me "poof" as a translation (as in "poof— it was gone") but I'm not sure about that. Either way, it's with that sense of un-here-ness, of transitional unreality, that we descend into the track, feeling its intricate organic percussion, its various mechanical clunks and clicks, drawing into its gallery of gently ping-ponging bloops and marimba and long flute-like bleeps. Cutesy yet ghostly vocals deliver sweetness above this cerebral beat, above the solid bass washed over by the harsh waves of noise (Phasma's touch perhaps?); the end of the track is a mash of sharp hi-hats and beeps 'n' boops bouncing like blops of neon.

The business in the track gives it colour, yet there's a sombre tone to it, perhaps in the simply fluctuating flute-like melody – an atmosphere that fits the name of Kidkanevil's aforementioned album: My Little Ghost – a name that instantly conjures a kind of endearing friendliness, yet within the frame of things passed, of phantomic proportions. And if it's all toeing this delicate balance of sombre fun, of cute lament – as well as featuring Japanese talent including the likes of Cuushe and Cokiyu – then it's gonna be a lovely album.

• My Little Ghost is out 9th May via a split between Berlin based Project: Mooncircle and the endlessly cool Tokyo label, flau.
• Get it from P:MC's Bandcamp (over here)
• Check out Kidkanevil's Q&A with YES/NO :)

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