Sometimes certain albums force you to ponder just how the heck that certain something was created. Syun’s Landscapes speaks of using fractal theory to both influence and create a lot of what you’re hearing here. Found on older Amiga, Mac and PC computers, software like VistaPro was responsible for creating virtual landscapes in an early internet world and in Landscapes its alien topographical artwork.
Long-forgotten generative software for defunct OSes would serve to provide an imaginative soundtrack. Blending computer-generated everything, somehow, these imagined lands blended into the music that’s remarkably undated. Led by P-Model’s Susumu Hirasawa, somehow an off-shoot meant to poke the record label bear, seven years later found a way to point into the far future – to use fractal theory as a means to tap into a new form of Japanese New Age.
Translating to “in season”, Syun or Shun, began in 1984 as a means to an end. For years, the Japanese Art Pop group P-Model (under the tutelage of Susumu Hirasawa) had explored all sorts of musical styles. Some abrasive like punk/industrial. Others like catchy techno-kayo-esque ditties that got them a huge fan base. Sometime in 1983, their record label Tokuma Japan started to demand more creative control over their recordings. Unwilling to succumb to censorship, after releasing Another Game, P-Model broke their contract and created a creative side project called “Another Act” which would release solo albums showcasing each member’s distinctive style/ideas.
Working under the alias, Shun, Susumu Hirasawa focused on sampler-based music. If you can find a copy of 1994’s Ooparts – Out Of Place Artifacts you’ll hear his attempts to create all sorts of broad styles touching on noise, industrial, electro, and leftfield pop.
Thoroughly taking advantage of his self-created “Heavenizer” sampler, from 1984 through 1987, Susumu somehow managed to release four EPs and singles that belonged to the school of Tolerance, Yapoos, and Hikashu, in between P-Model’s resurgent proper albums.
In the early ‘90s, as Susumu’s own solo work became increasingly more Pop-oriented, he finally had the clout to venture out to create his own label to foster a new kind of Japanese experimental music to get in touch with that Shun side again. Creating the label Diw Syun, there he’d reissue his older Shun work, but adopt the Syun moniker to reassess new territories he could take his exploration.
Enlisting the help of early Shun musician Akiro “Kamio” Arishima (key member of other, great Japanese experimental group: The Bach Revolution) and new school environmental musician who curated a few St. GIGA broadcasts, Motohiro Yamada, in this iteration a sonic shift occurred. Using generative software they created the majority of everything you hear and see on Landscapes. Four musical landscapes were generated each couched on portraying much of exactly what you see.
“Landscape 1” takes its mountainous topography to heart by creating percussive floating music that reminds me of good, early tribal music — albeit here with the AI largely generating the intriguing rhythms. “Landscape 2” uses an imaginary forest to present its most meditative, serene track, one driven by percolating pads that signal in and out like beacons leading you to a place where fragmented vocals course in as if part of the scenery, only to be washed away by pink noise.
“Landscape 3” mixes imagined desertscapes with imagined floating music (featuring all sorts of self-modulating bleeps and gurgles) that’s easily as hypnotic as the imagery conjured up by the Amiga’s generative topography software, that only gets spirited away quite significantly at the end. “Landscape 4” closes out the album in equally otherworldly fashion as its barren lunarscape-like depiction. This time we hear all sorts of environmental recordings mix it up with truly subterraneous synthscapes and treated vocals (which show Susumu’s longtime interest in Thai vocalese) coalescing in a way that’s both deeply futuristic yet equally as eternal.
Eventually, two years later, Syun would find a way to translate this imagination into the dancefloor on Kun Mae but I still prefer this bit of landmark surveying. So, as for you, do you have some 40-odd minutes to get lost elsewhere?