I have to admit that sometimes I have to know when to stop searching. As I close countless browser tabs and piece together all of my many thoughts about hard romantic’s Modern Ambient Colours, I have to make my peace with acknowledging this: I know now just as much as I knew when I first heard this mysterious bit of music.
Hard romantic is (or was?) the brainchild of Japanese sound designer and composer Hiroshi Ohhashi, who discovered a young, talented English boy soprano just 12 years old, by the name of Liam O’Kane, who sang at Northbury Church in London, and saw fit to combine Liam’s impressive voice with what Hiroshi dubbed his “velvet piano”. Transitioning from creating commercial music for advertising, film, and visual media, Hiroshi’s group “hard romantic” introduced a new fusion of ambient techno, “nu-jazz”, and electronica, with chorale music, that for a very brief period was spearheading a different type of Japanese healing music boom best typified later on by Boys Air Choir.
In an archived MySpace(?!) Hiroshi noted the influences of musicians like Ennio Morricone, Pat Metheny, William Orbit, Marcus Miller, and Enya, among many others. As a producer Hiroshi had worked with artists like Mikado, Joe Sample, and Ivan Lins, until he shifted into creating a kind of music that could be used to help others through music philanthropy and volunteerism. What was once music created for others, for fashion shows, galleries, and elsewhere, became a bit more personal through hard romantic.
What you’re hearing today is the project’s debut. Conceived as a way to bring collaborators from around the world to create a more sentimental form of ambient music, early records like 1996’s Modern Ambient Colours invited global names like Hugo Fattoruso of Brazil and homegrown performers like Chizuko Yoshihiro and Masayuki Himuro to conceive of inspired piano tones to create the soundscape heard in the music.
If you have a chance to look at the original liner notes, you can find Hiroshi noting the use of his “velvet piano” – an electronically processed acoustic piano, alongside more esoteric instruments like moonlit or fragrant piano, starry keyboards, sepia or “cool” instruments. Something conceived as a “piano in tears” plays the music on “ラ・プレギエーラ (La Preghiera ～Ave Maria～)”. Modern Ambient Colours is a fascinating record because, for all its ambient leanings, it leans heavily on that age-old instrument – the piano – in a different way, as it’s what’s been molded to create nearly everything you hear here.
For all you fans of Caoli Cano’s Cocu* project, you can surely hear seeds of its ideas planted here. Caoli, who lent her voice to a few songs on this album, would feature a similar mix of ethereal vocal chorale arrangements and downtempo beats on her future music. And although it may be considered gauche to say this, I think hard romantic reminds me of a continuation or an evolution of David Foster’s best instrumental work. Windswept, hazy, and quite yearning, Modern Ambient Colours gave you a more overtly sentimental side to Japanese ambient music closer in spirit to someone like a Toshifumi Hinata or Yukiyo Nakamura.
You get on songs like “パラディ (Paradis)” that first taste of Hiroshi’s “velvet piano”: a canvas-filling, heavily reverbed, electronically treated piano, playing its genuinely reflective and affecting lead melody as Liam sets the scene in the span of only a few words. The Walearic “センティメンタルな月 (Luna De Sentimento)” featuring Caoli Cano affects a different ambient mood where Chizuko Yoshihiro’s “fragrant piano” provides a romantic counterpoint to Hiroshi’s “blue instruments and cool keyboards”.
It’s telling that the album is called Modern Ambient Colours, as Hiroshi’s “velvet piano”, in its solo form, on “レゾナンス・オブ・ラヴ (Resonance Of Love)” leaves a sound trail steeped in an uncertain nostalgia. As modern as this album reckons to be, there’s old-fashioned romanticism guiding its light. It’s no wonder that, of all of hard romantic’s music, it would be the songs off this album that gained this project its greatest popularity, soundtracking the lovelorn commercials of elegant, minimalist Japanese fashion brand Onward – Crosset.
The gorgeous “moonlit pianos and gleamy instruments” leading “ロマンツァ (Romanza)” would get lost in another period record amid beats, drum loops, and samples. Modern Ambient Colours presents a welcome deviation into more immediate, universal music that so-called “ambient” music can be capable of. There’s a powerful, quiet elegance to songs like “ラ・プレギエーラ (La Preghiera ～Ave Maria～)” and “パラディッソ (Paradiso)”. Although the musical palette chosen by hard romantic might appear simple and belong to only one side of the spectrum, there’s just something about all the brush strokes spreading the space between. In between all of Modern Ambient Colours are gradients that remain uniquely “hard romantic”.
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