Japanese Ambient And New Age: The Environmental Synthesizer

Brain Eno may have coined the term ambient but Japanese artists did more with the genre than anyone else until the ‘90s.

There were precedents for ambient-style music before Brian Eno invented the term in the late 1970s. Erik Satie’s “Furniture Music” comes to mind. The commonality is that it’s meant to become part of the atmosphere of a space; to become like furniture. In the liner notes to his groundbreaking Ambient 1: Music For Airports album, Eno wrote, “Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it … Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.”

Improved In Translation

When ambient music arrived in Japan, the name was translated as kankyou ongaku (環境音楽), literally environmental music. For many Japanese artists who were inspired to compose in the new genre, they took the environmental aspect and ran with it. Rather than music to fill any environment, though, they created songs for specific environments. Many were commissions for corporate spaces, retail locations or museums. They were intrinsically tied to the environment they were to be played in. Think less nature environment and more urban environment. There was also a clear through-line to New York-style minimal classical music, another very modern and urban musical genre.

I’ve long loved ambient music. Making ambient music has been a large part of my musical career (small though it may be). Discovering Japanese environmental music was like a revelation. Here were multiple bodies of work by numerous accomplished musicians, all with a unique take on what I thought was a set style of music. Of course, being from the late 20th century, synthesizers and other electronic instruments played a big part in their creation.

Here then are some of my favorite examples of the genre with notes on the gear that they used.

Haruomi Hosono: Tourism Music

A shift occurred in Japanese pop musician Haruomi Hosono’s music in the late ‘70s. The former member of folk-rock band Happy End had been releasing albums heavily influenced by Tin Pan Alley and other early 20th-century musics when, suddenly, he put out Paraiso in 1978. With its exotica-based songs and heavy use of synthesizers, it sounded more like a trip to a fantastical and futuristic island than a pop record. The session musicians he assembled to help him make the record included Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, with whom he would soon form Yellow Magic Orchestra. But before that, he had another odd electronic record to make.

Called Cochin Moon, the album was inspired by a trip to India and is meant to capture the ambiance of the place—although recreated with synthesizers supplied by Ryuichi Sakamoto and programmer Hideki Matsutake. Hosono had been introduced to Brian Eno’s ambient music a few years before and the influence is clear here. Although there is music, it takes a back seat to environmental elements. This is an example of what Hosono punningly called kankou ongaku (観光音楽), or tourism music.

While there isn’t a lot of information available about what instruments Hosono and his team used on Cochin Moon, we can probably assume that it was similar to what he used on Paraiso as well as to what Sakamoto employed on his solo album, Thousand Knives, also released in 1978. Paraiso used many of the top synths of the time, including a Yamaha CS-80 and ARP Odyssey. These also appear on Thousand Knives along with Matsutake’s Moog IIIc, a Polymoog, Minimoog, Oberheim 8-Voice and Korg PS-3100. Let’s not forget Matsutake’s contribution. Listed in the liner notes as “programming,” this was probably a Roland MC-8, the same as on other YMO-related records of the time. The sequencing on Cochin Moon is very unusual, with the MC-8 often creating natural-sounding environments rather than exclusively song-based ones.

Hosono would go on to release many more ambient albums, particularly in the ‘80s, which was an especially fertile time for Japanese ambient.

Hiroshi Yoshimura: I’m So Green

By the mid-1980s, a small environmental music scene had developed. Organized around the Art Vivant book and record store in Tokyo, it saw like-minded artists coming together over a love of Erik Satie, minimalism and ambient music. One of the artists in this circle was Hiroshi Yoshimura, whose Green would become something a banner album for the genre.

Released in 1986 and composed on a Yamaha DX7, the album is meant to evoke the feeling of nature rather than just the color. Indeed, in Japanese, green is often used as a synonym for nature itself, seeing as the country is particularly verdant. It’s a testament to Yoshimura’s compositional and programming skills that he’s able to make the DX7 sound “natural.” FM synthesis has been called many things, from cold to glassy to metallic, but natural is not one of them. However, when you remember that he was working in an urban environment of metal and glass, and his music was often played in these environments, it makes perfect sense. It evokes nature from within an urban space.

The album is certainly peaceful enough to work in the broader context of “ambient” music. When the album was released in the United States in 1986 the label overdubbed sounds of nature (birds, water) to capitalize on the new age market. In fact, the new age movement was soon to have a big effect on Japanese ambient music.

Akira Ito: The Dawning Of The New Age

If you’ve never heard the Far East Family Band, the Japanese mid-‘70s progressive rock group, you should take care of that right now. While they can veer uninterestingly close to bands like Pink Floyd and Procol Harum, their use of synthesizers was always unique. It should be, as Klaus Schulze produced two of their records and the band featured three members who would go on to bigger things: the new age superstar Kitaro, the prolific Fumio Miyashita (whose healing music cassette series is a masterclass in new age ambient), and Akira Ito.

While also lumped into the new age genre, Ito’s music is a little more varied. “Marine Flowers (Science Fantasy),” a 1986 soundtrack for an undersea documentary (there’s that environmental connection again), avoids the usual new age trappings of cheesy melodies and crystal healing atmospheres, opting instead for a kind of Krautrock lite. Listening to the album, I hear nods to Cluster and La Dusseldorf, particularly in the melodies, which feel more continental than Japanese to me.

The album is not exclusively electronics—there are plenty of acoustic instruments like saxophone in the mix—but he did use a lot of synthesizers, reportedly all Roland and Korg. One that jumped out at me was in the track “Where Spirits Play,” a highlight of the album. The repeating melody line was probably played on a Korg miniKORG 700 or M-500, which both had parameters to loop a short, percussive envelope to create mandolin-like phrases.

Marine Flowers was recently released in the west but check out YouTube for more from this underrated artist.

Takashi Kokubo: Conditioned Air

The 1980s are called the Bubble Era in Japan. It was a time when money was plentiful and corporations could splurge on extras like a record to accompany an air conditioner. That’s the story behind Get At The Wave, a 1987 album by composer and sound designer Takashi Kokubo.

Commissioned by Sanyo and released in conjunction with a top-model AC unit, Get At The Wave finds Kokubo moving away from the analog synth-heavy anime soundtracks he had been doing to that time and moving in a more acoustic direction. Well, acoustic in that he started favoring samples of acoustic instruments. Chimes, pianos and other instruments create an ambient soundscape that’s just psychedelic enough to be interesting. (And for a record that came with a home electronic device, it’s actually very psychedelic.)

Photos from the time show Kokubo seated in his well-equipped studio with lots of digital and analog gear around him. There’s a Maxi Korg, a Korg MS-20, a Sequential Prophet-5, a Yamaha DX7, and a PPG Wave. But given the amount of sampling, I’d have to guess he used a Fairlight CMI, one of which can be seen in another photo.

Kokubo was incredibly prolific and YouTube is full of his albums, which from the ‘90s on became more and more new agey and less interesting, at least to my ears. But Get At The Wave does an excellent job of both being interesting and supporting an environment, in this case, your home (or wherever you’ve installed your Sanyo air conditioning unit).

Yoshio Ojima: The Touch Of Sound

Of all of the first wave of kankyou ongaku releases, Yoshio Ojima’s two-volume Une Collection Des Chainons series was probably the most arresting. Commissioned for the Spiral building in Tokyo by lingerie company Wacoal, the pieces are more than just ambient—some are practically industrial in sound. Ojima has a long history of creating challenging soundscapes as well as working with classical pianist Satsuki Shibano. Their 1994 album, Caresse, is an incredible melding of traditional piano, ambient and early digital computer processing.

Comprised of three long pieces, the album was made by combining Shibano’s piano (both straight and prepared) with a number of synthesizers, including a Sequential Prophet-5, a Studio Electronics P-Five, which is a chopped Prophet in a rackmounted box, Korg Wavestations, M1 and PS-3100, a Roland System-100m, an Oberheim Matrix-1000 and an E-mu Morpheus. These were linked with the computer and sequenced by early version of Cubase and Pro Tools, among others, and recorded to an eight-channel Pro Tools hard disc recording system. The mix of classical elements, older analog synths and early digital processing gives it a frayed edge, one you don’t often hear in typical environmental music.

Tetsu Inoue: The Ambient Otaku

All of the musicians we’ve looked at so far did their work in Japan. Tetsu Inoue though left Japan in 1986 and eventually settled in New York, where he was active until 2007. He did ambient ambient, the kind us Gen X ravers associate with The Orb, chill out rooms, and come-down headphone listening. He was on Pete Namlook’s FAX, after all, perhaps the most ambient ambient label of all time.

Although Inoue made ambient and not environmental music, environment was still important to him. His music was designed to be listened to at home, not out at a rave, and themes of place and location thread through his works. The 2350 Broadway series is a prime example. Named after the address of his apartment in New York, it’s a multivolume set made with Pete Namlook that captures that at-home feeling. The title of his most famous album, Ambiant Otaku, contains the Japanese word for “your home,”otaku (although it’s come to be exclusively associated with its more modern term, “geek,” in the West). Expanding outwards, World Receiver from 1996 used a shortwave radio to capture audio from places around the world that he then looped and combined with analog synths.

The earlier stuff was done on mostly analog and digital hardware, as expected. Sometime collaborator Taylor Deupree has stated that Inoue used a “Roland JD-800, Akai S3200 (or possibly an S1000), an Oberheim Matrix-6 or Matrix-1000, a Soundcraft Ghost mixer, and possibly a Korg MS-20, Roland SH-101 or Juno-106 and TR-606.” Elsewhere on the same boards, a poster commented that, “I recall Pete (Namlook) saying that the drones on the 2350 Broadway series were just the two of them wiggling the EMS Synthi which he brought over with him as hand luggage.”

Compare the earlier 2350 Broadway records with the last, part four, and you’ll hear very different textures. Released in 2007, the last Broadway record happened around the time that Inoue was getting heavily into computer-based DSP processing. It has that digital smear, the kind of rusty sheen that’s hard to get without 1s and 0s. He favored Max by Cycling ’74, which still exists to this day. You can also hear him at work on the HAT record which he did with Uwe Schmidt and—to bring us back to where we started—Haruomi Hosono.

Inoue’s last releases came out in 2007. Since then he has completely fallen off the map. There are many rumors about him, such that he died in the tsunami that accompanied the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Perhaps he doesn’t want to be found and has settled into his own private environmental space. I only hope he’s still making music there.

Thanks to Charles Uzzell-Edwards for the help with the Tetsu Inoue research.