Who says you need a trip out to the country to get into the spirit of Akira Inoue’s Anne: Dreaming an Island (The Light and Wind of Prince Edward Island) 夢みるアンの島 ～プリンス・エドワード島の光と風～? When I speak of road-tripping records, I speak of records just like this one, one that accepts all the conceits of the “road” and adds to it all the ruminative qualities only felt through fleeting sights that elicit long-lasting memories. Here, a gorgeous, quite late summer-esque, album of instrumental music inspired not exactly by L. M. Montgomery’s classic children novel Anne Of Green Gables but by the vistas and images surrounding its locale, inspires moments of nostalgia, moments of wandering wondering, and and spirited spiriting away.
Leave it to Akira Inoue to round up a talented cast of musicians — Hideo Yamaki, Saeko Suzuki, Aska Kaneko and Takayuki Hijikata (to name precious few) — to seriously soundtrack a project he was handed off. In early 1989, Akira was invited by Columbia’s Interface sub-label to contribute music to accompany a book by rising photography star, Kazutoshi Yoshimura.
Kazutoshi Yoshimura was around 20 years old when he travelled to Canada to pursue a career in landscape photography. Deeply inspired by myriad environments one can experience in the Great North, Kazutoshi would create various photo books that touched on a specific locale or collect photos that imbued a certain memory. One of those idyllic locations would be on the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island where he chose to reside.
Framing his photos with huge landscapes seen at a distant, the series of images he captured for 夢見るアンの島 (Dreaming An Island) would become wildly popular in Japanese bookstores after making their debut in various magazine spreads. As was au courant for the time, his photo book was published at just the right time when Anne Of Green Gables was experiencing a surge in popularity in Japanese culture. Akira Inoue was equally smitten by his pictures and lobbied to create an album of music that could soundtrack a series of images Kazutoshi had captured during his stay in Canada.
The kind of music Akira settled on would owe huge respects to the frontier music of Canada. As you play Anne: Dreaming an Island (The Light and Wind of Prince Edward Island) 夢みるアンの島 ～プリンス・エドワード島の光と風～ you can hear pangs of country music, pastoral impressionistic meanderings that are probably a bit New Age, and moody seafaring balladry not too far from maritime folk music. It’s wonderfully vivid music that goes from beach to forest (and everywhere in between) with complex compositions that have all the twists and turns of progressive music, yet is accessible enough to just leave in the background to chew on.
It seems to me that songs like “Islands” recall those easygoing blues of the past you’d hear on early Fleetwood Mac or Wishbone Ash. Gentle rockers to meditate on. Others like “Eien No Nagisa (永遠の渚)” harken back to Akira Inoue’s “Seaside Lovers” contributions, with “beachy” music more interested in promoting a melancholic atmosphere, an endless summer that will never quite be that. “A Song For Avonlea” featuring Karak’s guitarist Hisaaki Hogari doing his best Michael Brook impression, is an equally moving ode (in the capital letter sense) to the fictional town the book is set in. It’s a gorgeous track that begins with atmospheric affected guitar that somehow finds a way to fade into various emotions and sonic call tags — dreamy, fiery, expansive — only then end back on mysterious.
Akira’s partner, Sumiko Yamagata, makes a triumphant guest star as vocalist on songs like “Spirit Of Place” adding a touch of human drama to the session. An obvious highlight for me, and I wager many others, is one of Seiko Suzuki’s wonderful contributions “Green Gables No Asa (グリーン・ゲイブルスの朝)”. By far the most “Walearic” track of all, finds some kind of common ground between the idyllic landscape music Seiko wanted to contribute on tracks like “Baking Powder Fiddlestick” and Akira’s more bittersweet touches on the rest of the album. You tell me. Is it a folk song tinted by atmospheric jazz? Or is it moody jazz made right by some gorgeous, floating folk touches?
The album ends on another composition by Saeko, one played by Akira, “Echoes”, a song that sounds like a hymnal to a dream lost within the dream of a book. Bookending the experience of being able to listen to music that tries to divine for the listener a moving image on a static image, this curious “healing music” gives us a soundtrack to dream of an island, full of light and wind, in some place called Prince Edward Island.
And much like Anne Shirley, this 43 minute-long journey isn’t a linear thing but one full of memorable meanderings in that path we all can relate to traveling through. If you can’t steal away from your reality, surely, this music can conjure up some kind of an escape.