In light of everything that is currently happening at the time of this writing, I’d hate to add any dark energy into the world. For times like these, perhaps it’s a good occasion to revisit another work of the trailblazing Hiroki Okano. On ENN, (roughly translating to “circle”), we get to appreciate some of the beautiful music you can create simply by picking up some of the best/positive vibrations from those around you. Inspired by wind bell installations placed and performed by him in various Japanese landmarks and landscapes, ENN is as much environmental music as musical environment.
For those who didn’t read my previous entry on Hiroki, Mr. Okano was one of the few Japanese ambient artists who released their own works on “western” labels, with the vast majority of his golden period (largely) coming out of Germany’s New Age/Berlin School, Innovative Communication label. Before signing to that label, Hiroki had written music for stage and film. Commercial work with companies like Seiko and Panasonic afforded him the possibility to create situational, environmental sound installations that’d tweak his love of Japanese folk music into both liminal and ancient spaces.
By the time of his 1991 debut, 19871990 , he’d had around 4 years of trajectory redefining the “New Age” aesthetic to his more contemporary take on Japanese ambient music. Little-heralded for his work behind the scenes as sometime music director of radical ambient, biomusic satellite radio station St.GIGA, Hiroki Okano’s debut gave everyone just a small taste of the music and sound design created for its broadcasts. Impossible to pinpoint, 19871990 strikes on a palette wide enough to strike on tones of the Durutti Column and Mr. Yoshimura yet go deeper into the more neotraditional side hinted at in radio segues.
Just a year later, 1992’s ENN showed a different side (one I’ve been arguing is consistently missing from our promotion of Japanese ambient music) the one of Hiroki’s ties to the healing music driven by the ideas of other like-minded artists taking a different perspective to communicate the ethos of spirituality through quicksilver ghosts vacillating between various vessels. Largely organic music, ENN uses electronics as a way to add the thing magnetic recording lacks, as a way to flower the ageless, other instruments with whatever makes them nearly limitless in scope.
If you turn on the album you’re immediately taken to the environment Hiroki and friends (Kosei Yamamoto, Esoh, and Ikuko Tsutsui divined inspiration from. Somewhere among the waterfalls, rivers, trees, mountains and Japanese landscape, they hung one thousand Japanese wind bells, creating a small structure that winds of the earth can use to create their own soundscape. When they went back into the studio with the recordings of what would be Music Of Wind they felt inspired to create music capturing the structure of this environmental music.
ENN exactly sounds like a prototype of the music all above would explore a year later as “The Wind Traveling Band”. “Izumo (Kagome Remix)” makes no bones of its positively ancient ties to some of Japan’s oldest tradition, “remixing”/reimagining Shinto glossolalia until it sounds like this other meaningful human nature. Hypnotic sounds like this one — mixing longform vocalese, ambient sound design, ultra-minimal guitar and melodic wind instruments — form the base of a large part of ENN. Other songs like “Ama” clearly show their tie to that unmoored, fourth world sound, we’d get to experience further with the Awa Muse label. Tracks like “Kasumi” give you a brief, unaffected, recording of Hiroki’s and Kosei’s wind bell installation field recordings.
As 19871990 was its own uncategorizable stylistic cornucopia, so too does ENN’s ingress only show part of its bounty. Where exactly do we slot in music like “Hototogisu”? To call it ambient jazz would miss the fruit of deeply personal ambiance found skin deep. Where his debut felt something of his, this one, thankfully, as heard on tracks like “Sakura”, feel connected to his friends (like one Esoh playing that gorgeous yangqin), all completing a wonderful resonating vibration that can only come together when one decides to come together with others. Here’s to hoping there’s a little bit more of that in our future.