Perhaps as a bulwark against the internet’s information overload, a few peculiar “lost” electronic artists have been rediscovered in the past few years. There’s the marine biologist and self-taught composer Jürgen Müller, the electronic-dabbling housewife Ursula Bogner, and the Endless House Foundation, a series of fictitious compositions set in a “multimedia discotheque” in an Eastern European forest circa 1973. Maybe Martin Glass doesn’t completely belong in this imaginary stable of artists, but he is presented as an American businessman by day who sips fancy cocktails and finds himself “exiled in Taiwan… [falling] under the hypnotic spell of the Pacific.” Perhaps it’s that his name is one vowel away from becoming “Martini Glass” that makes you think about his debut album as the type of lounge music that returned to nostalgic reappraisal during the 1990s and is perhaps due for a return.
Much like the 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient music that is emulated on The Pacific Visions of Martin Glass, Glass is also taken by the sound of exotica. During that same era, Japanese artists like Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto playfully engaged with and subverted these conjured images of tiki bars, bamboo huts, mysterious seaports, mountain-top pagodas, and the like. In their music, these cliché cultural reference points became bent and distorted, lending an otherworldly sound to the compositions. Glass may also draw on this palette, but most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous, suggesting the soundtrack for a kitsch and leisurely lifestyle spent largely in a big leather booth.
The marimba tones that open “Okinawa Fantasia” are beckoning, warm enough to sound luminous. But just as a flute line enters and entwines with the melodic bed, the track fades away after just a minute-and-a-half. “Sound & Image” is Balearic almost to a fault, full of gauzy 1980s sounds looping against a shimmer of wind chimes, bird calls, and a twanging guitar line. It hovers in place and then slowly dissolves.
“Greetings From Under the Ocean” and “Floating to Work” are clear standouts, their gong-like tones and ambient haze unmoored and blissfully drifting like clouds. Nothing much happens on either track, but Glass strikes the right balance here between movement and inertia. But “Paradise Bubble” leans too far towards the latter. It’s ideal for walking slowly across sand, but not towards the horizon so much as in circles.
While most of the elements are there to make for a dreamy listen through the early digital tropes of ’80s Japanese music, Glass has two things working against him. One is that, once a handful of elements are in place, Glass is content to just leave them as is rather than push (or for music this mellow, nudge) them towards anything innovative or revitalized. The other is that by this point, any number of acts have already revisited this same sound. Beyond the stylistic ephemera of the era copped by plenty of fly-by-night vaporwave acts, artists like Jessy Lanza and Kate NV take cues from Japanese City Pop, while Visible Cloaks’ ardent and expert approach to that region’s abstract electronics has played out in vivid new ways. There are more thrilling engagements with this period of Japanese music and hopefully many more to come. Perhaps Glass himself will quit his day job and escape his purported “exile.” In the meantime, Pacific Visions is a missed chance at total immersion into such an ocean of sound, instead reduced to a mere toe dip.
