Some five years ago, curated by Visible Cloaks' Spencer Doran, Light in the Attic's Japan Archive imprint released a sublime assembly of Japanese interior music heard on, "Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990". For the edition, Doran rightly cites that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, John Cage and their 20th century contemporaries being taught in university courses attended by these then-young electronic pioneers. By bridging modernist and postmodern modes of composition with the then-concurrent forays into "musical furnishings" supplied by Brian Eno, their ideas about background, modes of attention, functionality, and the abstracting of authorship came to the fore. These were to then intersect with the timing of notable advances in technology. In the hands of this generation of electronic pioneers, hardware manufactured for the consumer market was to meet culture-specific notions of environment and sound. The arrival in the west of this assembly of "Lullabies for Air Conditioners: The Corporate Bliss of Japanese Ambient", as Simon Reynolds points out, couldn't be more perfectly timed.
In recent years, labels like Palto Flats, WRWTFWW, and Doran's own Empire of Signs have unearthed rare and much sought-after gems, "Telling the Musical History of Japan's Ambient Era". A number of these recordings have garnered a scale of attention rarely seen for such works of quietly eccentric minimalism. In the second decade of the 21st century, the refined sublimity of Hiroshi Yoshimura's "Music for Nine Post Cards", and the incomparable micro-percussive soundworld of Midori Takada's "Through the Looking Glass", have finally made their way to western ears. The particularly long and circuitous course Takada's music has taken is explored by The Guardian in their, "Ambient Pioneer Midori Takada: 'Everything on this Earth Has a Sound'". The masterful saxophone-driven electroacoustic pop on Yasuaki Shimizu's "Kakashi", and previously unreleased "Kiren" from 1984, have also discovered new audiences. Riding in the wake of the New York Times feature, “This Japanese Sax Polymath Might Be a Postmodern Bach”, Shimizu and band arrive in the United States for the first tour of its kind in five decades, including a date at Seattle's Madame Lou's.
