On her fourth album, the ambient folk artist Satomimagae imagines a world without names, lines, or borders—anything that could distinguish one thing from an absolute whole. What we might call “leaves” on “trees” here are simply shades upon shades. Every difference is negated. Listening to it feels like waking up from anesthetic, an experience in which there is no delineation between self and other, inner and outer.
Taba, the album’s title, is a Japanese term for bundling and sheafing, gathering material together. True to its name, the album sounds as though Satomimagae has extracted all the world’s resources and fed them into a juicer on quiet mode. Other than the rich open voicings of her guitar—the only distinguishable instrument on the album—it is difficult to determine the source of each sound; the electronic blurs into the acoustic, raw sounds blend into heavy audio manipulation. You’d be hard pressed to find a dominant emotion anywhere on the album, either. But Taba’s strength is in its indeterminacy: Its vagueness cathects a largeness of mood.
While Satomimagae’s previous albums felt more insular, the outside world begins to creep in on Taba. She finds the resonances between the natural landscape and the subject experiencing it. On “Ishi,” brushy textures slide past one another while crickets tweedle in and out of focus. On “Many,” a foreboding drone creates a grounding force while Satomimagae sings a pleading melody which sounds like loneliness calcified. By track five, “Mushi Dance,” the meeting point between inner and outer becomes psychedelically absurd, the music terrifically strange. Phasers fill the gray space while chirping birds provide a counterpart to Satomimagae’s guitar, the boundaries between the human and avian disintegrated.
While making Taba, Satomimagae gave focused attention to the various sounds of life outside her home studio in Tokyo, carrying a recorder wherever she went. We hear, among many other things: crickets, birdsong, wind, waves, babbling brooks, children—all of which eventually become indistinguishable from Satomimagae’s own recording techniques and electronic effects. What sound like waves on “Metallic Gold’ might also be speakers deprived of a musical source, hissing out air. What sounds like a brook on “Spells” might be the liquidy click of a recorder turning on and off. Rather than depicting a static, predictable world, these songs find in nature a kind of unsettling dynamism that shifts, moves, transforms, and folds in on the self.
The relatively linear and lucid songwriting of Satomimagae’s previous albums gives way to something much more impressionistic and improvisatory. On “Omijinai”she hums idly, quietly establishing a pattern of tension and resolution between skeins of guitar. On “Tonbo,” her guitar is a textural tool, poised and paced, while equally capable of giving over to flights of spontaneous emotion. With one eye on the world, Satomimagae conjures her own shivery, bucolic ecosystem, inviting her listener to find in these sounds some kind of experiential truth. There is something essential and indescribable driving this music. You can’t quite put your finger on what it is, but at times it is so beautiful you could just about live off of it.
