Someone’s going to look back at this post and wonder: “why the hell did this guy write so much about what amounts to be adult lullaby music”. Well, stopping “theoretical person” in their track, I do so because this kind of music is unlike much else you’ll hear today. Ken-Ichiro Isoda’s ナチュラル・トリップ マジエルの星, which (don’t quote me on this) roughly translates to “ Natural Trip ・ Majel’s Star ”, takes us further into what this idea of Japanese Healing Music is. You hear it, it’s gorgeous, placid mix of impressionistic neoclassical music blending with field recordings, and you get a sense that this is music with a set purpose. In Ken-Ichiro’s case, as it was here, was to create ambient music that can give you the sonic experience of a “natural high”. It’s soothing music made around an underlying alpha wave frequency, albeit music of a definite, high caliber. It’s music made as engaging BGM, for any nervy head.
Ken-Ichiro Isoda is one of those Japanese New Age masters few people scarcely know about. Much like Mr. Takashi Kokubo, Ken-Ichiro has been operating both on the fringes of music and right in front (creating various musics for soundtracks, CMs, or working as music teacher, literary author, and much more). His “fringe” work, arguably, began when this Osaka native dropped out of Tokyo’s University of Agriculture and Technology and pursued his musical career doing production work for numerous, forgotten J-New Wave and jazz bands. Disturbed by the amount of noise he was contributing to the musical environment, Ken-Ichiro, dejected, after a while, turned elsewhere for inspiration. His “fringe” work creating healing music for day-to-day life had a lifespan of over a decade.
Finding inspiration in ethnic folk music, impressionist classical music, and studying music healing systems, he was one of the first to join Satoshi Ashikawa’s groundbreaking “environmental music” label — Sound Process — to explore a different form of music that could combine these quiet sounds into therapeutic music. Working with his brother Shigeharu Isoda, and friends, pianist Hiroshi Hirohashi, and saxophonist Nobuya Sagawa, they created the first “band”, Oscilation Circuit, that would function as an offshoot of this label to create more challenging, spirited music which would mine the territory of ECM, and modal world music. Less environment and more music, on their first and only release, Oscilation Circuit treated listeners to hypnotic compositions unlike little else done in Japan, at that time.
Série Réflexion 1, which I wrote about before, was supposed to be the first in a series of “reflective” albums that would serve up music that took inspiration from simpatico ideas toyed with by Terry Riley and Arvo Part, ideas found in “spiritual” musical works and so on. Unfortunately, with Satoshi’s untimely death, whatever brilliant beginning they showed there had little where else to go.
Some, like Shigeru, would go into anime and video game music. Others like Hiroshi and Nobuya would go back into session work or jazz ensembles. For six years, Ken-Ichiro was in no-man’s land. It wasn’t until huge Japanese label Apollon decided to cash in on the spa and wellness market that Ken-Ichiro would be able to resurface and create music that needed his input.
In between writing his first book on Impressionist music, Ken-Ichiro theorized what would it take to update, in a different way, the promise laying somewhere in Satie’s “furniture music”. For him, it appeared that playing more with less is still valid, but that repetition, that could evolve organically, seemed a natural evolution. Trying to wed this engaged minimalism with deep dives into what tonal, pitched, instrumentation can do to the mind, it was his contributions to the α波 1/fのゆらぎ series which separated out what he (and the rest of the artists in it) were trying to do, as compared to classic ambient musicians.
This is what I’ll leave you to discover in my current favorite of his, I believe, 10 releases. ナチュラル・トリップ マジエルの星 takes inspiration from twilight sounds and from quiet raindrops to create long, very slowly evolving pieces that recall Eno’s pre-digital ambient work, or the work of Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius, where every micro, tonal shift keeps you occupied when the mind tends to seek octopus-like gratification. You’ll scarcely realize how all the interplay of sax (played by friend Nobuya Sagawa), cello (played by Tomoya Kikuchi), vibraphone, rain, synths (played by Ken-Ichiro) and piano (played by Minako Koyanagi) work to create a “pink” sonic atmosphere where one central piece just flows back and forth, through all of them. It’s a masterpiece, of (arguably) a new kind of impressionism we’re still barely scratching the surface of.