Space and Certainty: On the Rise of Japanese Ambient Music
Genres that parade their country of origin as part of their name have always given me the same impression as the fancier range of food in the supermarket. And yet, unlike Sicillian Lemons or Belgian Chocolate, music with geographic genre tags usually live with enough difference to their borrowing genre that the region is well worth mentioning. In this particular case, the rise of Japanese ambient music as something individual and distant from ambient music as a whole is worth analysing. I will attempt this in two ways: firstly why physically this was able to happen, and secondly why it resonates with so many people.
The answer to the first question can be relatively easy, and it didn’t happen that long ago. If you google such a question, the cluster of articles at the top of your screen will all be dated sometime around early 2019, and pay large homage to Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990, a compilation released by Seattle record label Light in the Attic, and compiled by visible cloaks’ Spencer Doran. This is what properly threw the genre into the mainstream, the breadth and the newness of the music to the western demographic made the compilation a huge success, and eventually led to the re-releases of records by the big players in the genre like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa and Midori Takada.
So that’s the easy answer. The more interesting answer can be found in articles written before that time, such as this wonderful offering from Fact. Here, DJ and record store owner Chee Shimizu speaks of the interest in Japanese ambient and new age music really taking off in the early 2010s, and credits Amsterdam as the ignition point for the genre in Europe, with Music from Memory founder Jamie Tiller leading the wave. The article also lumps praise on a) record bins for allowing a lot of these records to be available to people who were willing to look, none more so than Yoshimura’s AIR, an album initially made as promotional material to capture the essence of a Japanese fragrance, and b) YouTube for later making these rips readily accessible to the wider world. As with a lot of ambient music, the true renaissance of these records came from a desire to discover what was already there.
And now onto the second question: why do these records appeal to so many; why Japanese Ambient? When answering this largely subjective question with my own opinion, I am going to try and refrain from references to the Covid-19 Pandemic, as despite Yoshimura’s Green being reissued last June to much media fanfare, the initial rise of the genre was far before this point. That said, the pandemic has brought to unwavering light many of late capitalism’s symptoms, and I would personally argue that a lot of these symptoms are exactly those which lead the genre to appeal to so many.
If you look at what a site like Rate Your Music has voted as the most popular ambient music, then you get an offering quite far from that of Ashiakawa and company. Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker, Grouper, Natural Snow Buildings, what is popular amongst music nerds (for want of a better term) in terms of Ambient music has left Eno’s Airport. But the Japanese strain, more traditional to the influences of Erik Sarte, sticks to this calmer approach, this approach of quietness, of greenery. What the capitalist way of life doesn’t offer is introspection, is looking inwards: there simply isn’t time for it. Environment, closeness is so important to the brand of Japanese ambient music that environment is practically listed as a genre in the Light in the Attic compilation mentioned earlier. This music was largely being made through a huge period of economic growth for Japan, and the anxieties of this national wealth are not only so presently rallied against here, but also stick so true for so many living under capitalism to this day. What you get when listening to Blink or Still Space is such an awareness of space, such insulation, that you don’t get with the fuller offerings of Aphex or Grouper. This is not to say these artists cannot fill these roles, but just that this specific strand of music is such a deliberate antidote to instant coffee and snapmaps that to not notice this detail is to miss a major part of its appeal.
I don’t think I can sum all of this up better than Midori Takada herself:
“Don’t you think that Classical Music epitomizes an era of the struggles for overseas supremacy? It uses its energy and spirit towards instigating an outward bound offensive and a course of domination, not a spirit based on building one’s inner self. In the late 1970s, as I became more seriously involved in African and Asian music, I discovered that these forms of music were directed inward. As a performer, this music asked you to personally examine your own physical transformation. [...] Looking back I now feel that western style music is an outward-bound musical style that has a sense of aggression inserted within it.”
At a time of fragility, a time of introspection, is it hardly surprising that this sonic philosophy resonates with people?