The opening song on Gonno's debut album, Remember the Life Is Beautiful, is called "Hippies". I don't know what the attitude towards hippies is in Gonno's native Japan, but there's no doubt in my mind that the song is meant sympathetically. Its backmasked guitars waft like dandelion tufts across an open field, and its bass tone is as reassuringly heavy as a hand-me-down blanket. It's ambient techno the way it's meant to be made, fleshed out with acid lines and updated with live drums, and the way it develops is so effortless—building to a softly rounded climax and then rolling back downhill—that it feels less like a work of art than a product of nature.
One place the hippie ideology has continued to flourish in dance culture is in the so-called Balearic scene, the fuzzily defined style of music that grew out of Ibiza's discotheques in the 1980s, when DJs like Alfredo and Jose Padilla bricolaged together an eclectic, sunset-friendly style out of ambient, dub, yacht rock, krautrock, acid house, and anything else that fit the mood. Gonno's Balearic bona fides are solid. After years of making relatively rugged, stripped-down techno, he took an abrupt turn in 2011 and wound up on Ibiza's very own International Feel, ground zero for the current decade's Balearic revival. On Remember the Life Is Beautiful, he extends his emotive, exploratory approach to album length, the optimal way to engage with it—not as a series of singles but in an extended session that unfolds like a meal among friends at dusk.
Remember isn't strictly a "dance" album, although warm-up DJs will find plenty of copacetic material here, and a few tracks are relatively peak-time in their energy. "Stop", with its ragged hi-hats and triplet bass, might be a vintage Border Community track, and "Revoked", with its chimes, arpeggios, and chugging groove, is part DFA and part Carl Craig. Four Tet and Caribou's hybridized live drums and machine beats inform a few tracks here, as do their photosensitive quirks and generally wistful air.
The uptempo cuts are the exceptions; most songs are stolidly midtempo, if not outright sluggish. In "The Worst Day Ever", which creeps along at 100 beats per minute, small plucked sounds pile up into a shimmering whole that verges on sensory overload; the equally dreamy "Confusion", a hair faster, affects a majestically relaxed groove. The sonic balance he achieves, between ethereal vibes and physical modeling, is tricky enough; few artists can project a sense of chill that's so convincing. Fittingly, some of the most powerful songs do without drums entirely. "Beasts in Your Mind" runs Göttsching's arpeggios through the Cocteaus' delay pedals, while "Already Almost" goes for a midnight swim in Harold Budd's blue lagoon. And on "The Island I've Never Been", he swaps out the drums for clanking ship's bells, climaxing with a green flash of arpeggiated synths before succumbing to dusk again. It's a wonderful summation of the album's strengths. Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.
