For those unfamiliar with the work of Hiroshi Yoshimura, the title of the final track – “Satie On The Grass” – gives some clues as to what we can expect on Flora. Satie is of course Erik Satie, the French composer and pianist who himself was a pioneer of “furniture music”, a style intended as a form of background music, as opposed to conscious listening. He was a significant influence on the formation of minimal music, which began to take shape in the ’60s, a couple of decades before the recording of Yoshimura’s landmark albums of his own take on furniture music, or as it’s now better known, environmental music.
The Japanese phrase for this genre is kankyō ongaku, a term which became more widely known in 2019 when Light In The Attic released the boxset Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, which includes one of Yoshimura’s best tracks, “Blink” from his masterful 1982 debut, Music For Nine Post Cards. The following year, LITA reissued his equally hypnotic 1986 album Green, which helped inspire a wave of interest in his work outside his native Japan. He unfortunately did not live to see the resurgence, having passed away in 2003.
Yoshimura was born in Yokohama in 1940 and began to study music at an early age, starting on piano at age five. As an adult, he became interested in minimalist composers like John Cage and, later, the experimental art of the Fluxus movement and the musical philosophy of Satie. In the ’70s he formed Anonyme, which has been described as a “computer music band”. Another touchpoint came from the atmospheric, place-based ambient work of Brian Eno, in which Yoshimura saw his sonic interests reflected back at him. He also became friends with avant-garde composer Harold Budd and in 1983 even helped set up his first concert in Japan.
All of this is felt in Yoshimura’s own music, sculpted from his various influences and transformed into the uniquely environmental ambient soundscapes that would become his calling card. He managed to effortlessly capture moods so comfortable, charming and calming that the release of his first album, the aforementioned Music For Nine Post Cards, was actually inspired by listener inquiries. It was sparked by a visit to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, during which he was moved by the view of trees in the courtyard as seen through the window. The museum agreed to play this music within the building, and visitors who heard it were so interested that the album was given a wide release as the first installment in fellow ambient pioneer Satoshi Ashikawa’s series Wave Notation.
This eventually led to a number of commissions and compositions, some for independent film but others with a more site-specific intent. With his background as a sound designer, Yoshimura had developed an uncanny ability to both reflect on and respond to the location where the work was intended to be played. 1986’s excellent Surround, for example, was commissioned by home builder Misawa Homes; the music was meant to be regarded as an amenity of the company’s prefabricated homes. In Yoshimura’s own view, the album belongs in the same sound world of “the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup.” It’s a brilliant distillation of the fact that his pieces place the seemingly mundane in a new context, subtly altering perceptions and usually drawing your attention to the environment around you.
Following the release of Music For Nine Post Cards, a string of similarly designed albums followed, almost none of which would have been easily accessible outside Japan. Since the 2017 reissue of Music… and his inclusion on the Kankyō Ongaku compilation, a growing series of reissues is bringing his music all across the world. The most recent is Temporal Drift’s reissue of Flora, an album recorded in 1987 but not released on CD until 2006. Stylistically in line with the ambient, New Age-inflected work Yoshimura had created the previous year, Flora is a buoyant expression of the textures of the natural world, likely inspired by walks he took at the Edo-era park near his home.
It opens with the instantly pleasing “Over The Clover”, plinks of sound gliding in and out of the dimensions of daily life. “Asagao” is all shimmers and whistling wind, while “Ojigisou” is just a touch angular, minimalist piano interspersed with synth pulses resembling alien transmissions; both pieces are named after flowers. The album comes the closest to a traditional song with the delightful “Maple Syrup Factory”, which feels like a clear precursor to modern microgenres like cozy synth. “Adelaide” has a vaguely galactic feel yet hums with an earthy pulse, a kind of minimalist contradiction.
Yoshimura is no stranger to wistfulness either, and we get various melancholy moods throughout the second half of the album, until the piano-driven “Satie On The Grass” brings us back to a soft, delicate space. Yoshimura’s serene, life-affirming music deserves the widest audience possible, and this reissue of Flora is one more step on the way to expanding it.
