As I keep coming back to Rynten Okazaki’s サウンド フォトシリーズ①ー富良野 Sound Photo Series 1 – Furano, I keep trying to place myself in the mindset of its intended audience. Impressionistic, modal, pastoral, those are a few of the adjectives one can use to describe Mr. Okazaki’s recording. Yet those same words, and many more, can be grafted onto his chosen muse for this record.
Much like America’s Midwest, the Scottish Highlands, France’s Brittany, or Germany’s North Rhine, Japan’s Hokkaido prefecture, and more specifically, its Furano-Biei region, holds a similar special place in the hearts and minds of native Japanese as America’s “heartland” holds for me.
The Kamikawa Basin which hold Furano and Biei sits in a valley nestled between the Daisetsuzan, Tokachi, and Yubari mountain ranges, giving it its distinctive wide-open landscape of gently rolling hills and flatlands that proved perfect for early settlers, who turned it into one of Japan’s most fertile and famous farming communities. Located in the northern reaches of a country where personal and environmental space can sometimes feel like it comes at a premium, the lavender fields of Biei and the grazing dairy farms of Furano can feel like a palette cleanser for modern cotidian Japanese life, a place where one can truly escape from it all to touch grass.
Rynten came not from Hokkaido but from Hiroshima, where he was born and raised in 1954. As a young student, he’d “spread out maps of Japan and let [his] thoughts drift to lands [he] had yet to see.” Tokyo felt like a modern metropolis full of huge buildings and endless people, just as it appeared in photographs. Elsewhere, he fixated on the seemingly impassable mountains of Japan’s Nagano region. Then he remembered seeing photos of gently sloping beaches “where you can wear short sleeves all year round” in the islands of Okinawa. Hokkaido, though, seemed different. It always felt distant.
It wouldn’t be until Rynten was around twenty years old that he first visited Hokkaido. Getting to know its great wilderness and its people, who possessed a certain “northern sensibility,” left a lasting impression on him. Not-so-hidden behind Hokkaido’s beautiful scenery was also its rugged individuality, one gleaned from a harsh environment where seasonal change truly inspired those living there to appreciate life in ways other places could not.
You could make the case that Rynten embodied a certain aspect of that “northern sensibility.” His journey toward becoming a guitarist came through Western music. Songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Anji,” Led Zeppelin’s “Black Mountain Side,” and Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” spurred in him an early love for the instrument. Unable to afford lessons, he taught himself, eventually coming into contact with and performing even more instrumental music that cemented his devotion to the acoustic guitar. By the time he was in college, Rynten had discovered Americana and the “American Primitive” movement popularized by artists like John Fahey and Stefan Grossman, diving deep into freer instrumental styles like ragtime, if you can believe it.
While biding his time as a session guitarist, he began conceiving of himself as a solo artist in the 1980s. When Rynten heard Michael Hedges’ Breakfast in the Field, he knew he had found another artist who understood the direction he himself wanted to take, even if Hedges had beaten him to the punch. Working backward from there, he discovered America’s New Age acoustic movement, headlined by artists like William Ackerman and Alex de Grassi. In their music he heard guitarists unbound by any particular style. Far removed from the earlier folk influences of his past, these were musicians more interested in evoking mercurial landscapes and emotional language through their acoustic guitars.
That sense of evoking scenery through guitar would spiral into his solo debut for Pony Canyon, 1990’s Bayside Resort. On it, songs like the title track and “Scandinavia” spirited so-called “resort music” through a more atmospheric lens. Nostalgic in tone, Bayside Resort captured some of the obvious technical prowess Rynten could express when left to his own devices. As an amuse-bouche, in hindsight, it felt like preparation for what would come next.
Eight years later, after a long career writing BGM for screen and media and after working as both a teacher and transcriber, Pony Canyon wisely chose Rynten to kick off a healing music collection they dubbed the “Sound Photo Series.” Each CD in the series would be tied to a specific location: Furano, Tsuwano, and Azumino, all richly evocative places presented through the photography of elite Japanese photographers alongside instrumental guitar music.
By this point in time, Rynten, now past his youthful golden days, had held onto that gift of age that allowed him to maturely capture the spirit this series intended to express. Remembering his time in Hokkaido enabled him to gather together its multitude of impressions and feed them into original compositions evocative of its land and people. Photography by Biei’s own famed photographer, Shinzo Maeda, who passed away the same year the album was released, cemented an additional emotional heft within the music. Looking backward while playing forward, Rynten sussed out all sorts of beautiful and evocative compositions that genuinely felt “Furano.”
The opener, “大地の輝” (Daichi no Kagayaki), strikes the album’s first thematic note. A stop-start flurry of rolling, pointillistic guitar, it feels part of the Furano Basin itself, capturing its radiant landscape. Then, on the following track, “碧のファンタジー” (Midori no Fantasy), we get that melodically rich, dreamy, countryfied pastoralia that Rynten can so easily unfurl across six open-tuned strings. Sound Photo Series 1 – Furano speaks to the universality of rural sound and songcraft.
Complex pieces like “Europa Nocturne” stretch out the tonal possibilities of the acoustic guitar, using rich accompaniment to craft ambient folk music that seems to float above time itself. One of my personal favorites, “Eros,” uses multi-tracked looping guitars to create a rich tapestry of interwoven melodies and harmonic techniques, soundtracking memories of vast passing clouds and even vaster blue skies. Full of breathless moments, Sound Photo Series 1 – Furano was never meant to function as mere background music, but rather as music with a rich background.
In between all the original songs Rynten wrote for the record, old favorites like “麻衣” (Mai), “Bayside Resort,” and “Scandinavia” make reappearances, each receiving a stunning fresh coat of paint that renders them in the same sepia-toned hue as the rest of the album. Quietly gorgeous songs like “Toriko” are sandwiched in between, budding with electronic embellishments that lend his nostalgic tone a certain earned wisdom.
In the end, it’s a struggle to describe an album like this. One can take the easy road and call it “acoustic instrumental music,” but that would miss the point entirely. When a painter paints a still life, he is not merely trying to capture a photograph. In the hands of true masters, a certain abstraction leaves space for the listener’s or viewer’s mind to fill in the larger void behind the canvas. There’s a wordless power in that–those personal mental pictures that linger far longer. We’ve already had a taste of what this means when we heard Shinsuke Honda’s Silence.
As I hear Rynten do the same on songs like his own “Still Life,” I only need a faint glimpse of Furano to feel a certain, larger depth of perception. Though I’ve never been to Hokkaido, I feel remarkably close to it whenever I play Rynten’s music on any road that’s less traveled. Fate-permitting we’ll get there some day.
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