An under-explored element of the streaming era has been the growth of functional listening. Because we spend so much time near computers that grant us access to a virtually limitless amount of music, we are discovering new ways to soundtrack our lives. Whether it’s kids gathering around a YouTube channel to listen to lo-fi hip-hop while studying or a journalist looking for music to write to, we’re always searching for sound to keep us company. I suspect there’s a connection between that search for functional sound and the recent uptick in interest in ambient-leaning electronic music from Japan in the 1980s. Now that particular curiosity has the perfect introduction. Light in the Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, curated by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks, is the right compilation at the right time, bringing together a wide selection of the music that has been rediscovered in a highly listenable package delivered with appropriate context.
“Kankyō ongaku” is Japanese for “environmental music,” and as used here it’s an umbrella term for calm, spacious, and slightly chilly music generally built from synthesizers and sound effects. In the liner notes, Doran points out that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with composers who became fixated on the work of Erik Satie, John Cage, and, later, Brian Eno, particularly their ideas about background, modes of attention, authorship, and functionality. Those ideas were integrated into culture-specific notions of environmental music—Doran highlights the use of dripping water in Japanese garden design as an example, and there’s a strong connection between some of this work and architecture—and brought to life with emerging synthesizer technology. As a listening experience, the two-hour set is deeply satisfying, sustaining a consistent mood while offering a number of textures and styles. It also feels almost eerily “now” in 2019, as it brings to mind the fetish for early digital culture that informs the work of electronic music composers like Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, and Doran’s own group.
It’s remarkable how artists from such vastly different musical backgrounds (the liner notes offer short histories for each, along with contextual explanations for each track) made music that fits into this sound world. Haruomi Hosono is a wide-ranging singer-songwriter with a clutch of eclectic albums who also made punky, danceable electro-pop with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and his track “Original BGM,” which closes the set, is 15 minutes of slow-crawling bliss, filled with long silences and simple, gradually unfolding melodies. Yellow Magic Orchestra themselves make an appearance with their remarkable instrumental interlude “Loom,” an Escher staircase of drone that sounds like it’s in a constant state of arrival.
From Hiroshi Yoshimura, a composer, writer, and theorist whose ideas were foundational for much of the music found here, comes “Blink,” a simple piece of devastating beauty built around two melodic motifs. Kitamura Masashi made his name in the 1970s prog rock scene and later formed post-punk outfit YBO², and his track “Variation III” consists of crashing waves, bells, and drum hits, bringing to mind a landscape that feels eerily like (but apart from) what we call “nature.” Toshi Tsuchitori worked as a free-jazz drummer but here contributes a piece that is mostly silence interrupted by occasional hits of metallic percussion.
That tracks from such a wide array of musicians can be brought together in a set that sounds so cohesive is a tribute to Doran’s curatorial acumen. These pieces aren’t really bound together by an overriding “scene” but rather by their clear aesthetic qualities—they are gentle, quiet, emotionally non-specific, and filled with silence. The music here also evokes the decade of the set’s title, and the tentative steps made during that era toward the digital world that surrounds so many of us.
Kankyō Ongaku is Light in the Attic’s third multi-disk box set focusing on ambient music in the last 10 years, and each is enriched by considering the differences between them, and how formats shaped the way the music was heard the first time. The 2013 collection I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990, focused on obscure sounds, some of which initially circulated on cassette tapes in new age shops that stocked them alongside packs of incense, crystals, and books about mysticism. The sequel, 2016’s The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986, drew heavily from the trippy kosmische music created by German musicians like Roedelius, Ash Ra Tempel, and Popol Vuh, and it felt very much like a vinyl artifact, a portrait of a time when heads of a certain stripe would entertain themselves by listening to long-form music in front of a component stereo.
Kankyō Ongaku brings to mind the compact disc, which overtook the music industry in the second half of the ’80s and still has a pretty good foothold in Japan. Early ambient music was very much an analog idea, with sounds that were blurred and vaporous, but on Kankyō Ongaku, the sounds are crisp and clean, the edges clear. Perhaps contrary to intuition, the highly “designed” nature of this music also makes it feel very human, and also increases its versatility as far as background listening for other tasks. This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.
