Review Summary: Postcard ambient
I've never been entirely convinced by the theory of ambient music as a meditative canvas for interior space, as a portal to convenient pocket universes for the listener to expand themselves into. There's no shortage of music or criticism to support an overwhelmingly audience-oriented perspective, but these readings are so pervasive that it's easy to mistake them for a raison d'être. None of that - ambient is bigger (and smaller) and much more wonderful than your headspace! We'll give the precedent its due: your Tangerine Dreams, your Brian Enos, your Steve Roaches, and, for more contemporary radiator-sniffers, your Stars at the Lids and Celers hit quiet, emotive beats over and over again without attaching any obvious sense of structure, beckoning all manner of listener-imposed narratives or reflections. The music offers us a space to inhabit; our powers of projection are called upon to spruce it up. It's not always so clear-cut - two of my go-tos, Vladislav Delay and Tim Hecker, construct spaces so alien with sounds so imaginative that I tend to leave my baggage at the door, simply wandering in to see where they take me - but still, that sense of the traditional ambient listener as someone who pays as much attention to their inner being (or whichsoever book-washing/plant-reading/dish-watering priority is at hand) as to the music in their ears is a sticky, sticky trope for this most diffuse of genres.
By contrast, it's uncommon to encounter ambient that looks outwards rather than inwards, less at abstract space than at the lingering touches of the corporeal world. Where is the ambient that suggests something compact and tangible? The appeal and the audience mindset here is akin to haiku, the ideal for which is for the poet to share a momentary insight - profound or trivial - by recording the material circumstances that produced it (usually some observation of the natural world) in infamously compressed poetic form, in clipped language suggesting rich sensation, in the hope that such an insight might be able to revive itself in the hearts and minds of sensitive readers in a different setting. Haiku looks outwards at the objective world of rocks and trees and ponds and birds, and picks up on subtle contrasts that spark powerful associations; it addresses a world far more literal than that of music, but its tendency towards otherwise ineffable emotional truths has much in common.
This, shock of all horrors, is the ambient of this lovely, lovely album
Grace by Haruka Nakamura! Haruka Nakamura is a multi-instrumentalist and chamber/minimal/lo-fi hip-hop (we don't talk about this) composer from Japan;
Grace, his debut record, is quite possibly unique in the way it captures that haiku-effect of sketching vivid moments within suggestive outlines. It's a postcard-esque collection of 13 ambient tracks, which range from just under two to just over five minutes in length - in ambient terms, this is about as compressed as you get. These are put together with a gorgeous mix of chamber instrumentals, swoon-worthy female vocals, field recordings, delicate synthscapes, and occasional folktronica-inclined effectsboarding: a broad palette tastefully navigated. In keeping with this scope, the pieces themselves cover a striking range of moods. The album opens with a pastoral folk chant ("every day"), which in conjunction with the following "arne" quickly sets the expectation of an album's worth of twee Ghibli-esque homages to an overbearingly idyllic countryside. Not so: the third track "opus" dives into much more oblique territory with its wavering piano lead, while "ralgo" is a much more percussive affair, staccato beats driving its central mantra in soft clamour. The album's twin interludes ("elm [2]") are scatty guitar meanderings peppered with field recordings, while both "luz" and "cielo" pare their arrangements back in favour of utterly resplendent vocal performances. Pick 'n' mix has rarely been so joyous and so tranquil at once.
The upshot of this is that
Grace changes tack too fast and too often for the listener to project nearly as much of themselves over it as they might have done with the ambient forefathers. Much like haiku, these pieces are succinct enough to suggest something greater than themselves, and are so richly sensory, so delightfully unguarded in their melodic simplicity, so evocative without so much as a hint of the grandiose in their vocabulary, so prone to the sentimental yet so steeped in the ineffable, that they have little trouble in doing so. Unlike haiku, I have no idea what material stimuli, if any, prompted these pieces. A little imagination is necessary, and no tall order: "ralgo" is practically a bottled memory of watching someone else chop vegetables, harvest crops, beat a futon; highlight (and later Nujabes-remixed) "lamp" is a hazy polaroid taken strolling homewards under fading light as summer dusk sets in, the air thick and warm, the breath of life close at hand; "sign"'s eponym is less a literal placard and more a subtle inkling, perhaps in late August, of an imminent change of seasons. "luz" and "cielo" are unparseably steeped in my own memories of soaking up as much of Japan as I could in one final week before leaving the country for the first time in two years, but they've borne that saturation so well that I have little doubt they can do similar things for you. So it goes: this record is full of contours to hang these kinds of associations on.
I don't think it matters that the
Grace's actual inspirations remain a mystery to me and, alas, likely you: this record's powers of suggestion speak perfectly well for themselves. Its vignettes open pocket after pocket of fleetingly precious memory within and beyond the listener, and, having initially dismissed them as quite a twee collection of innocuous motifs, I've found these tracks' engaging qualities far more enduring than could have been expected. This album achieves its wistful snapshot effect incredibly well, but it was not an approach Nakamura stuck with: his following album
Twilight turned the chamber-ambient palette to a far more understated, expansive trajectory, following which he switched tack and mucked in with the Hydeout Productions crowd (Nujabes, Uyama Hiroto and associated rappers). His past few years have been prolific, but my God does his stint as a fresh-faced daydreamer on
Grace hold up with the best of them. A gem crammed with gems.
