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Chihei Hatakeyama, "Saunter"
This is an aptly titled and blessed-out slab of shimmering pastoral ambiance by this Tokyo-based composer. Saunter is inspired by the unfamiliarity and heightened awareness of moving to a new home (and the philosophical underpinnings of traditional monochromatic Chinese landscape paintings, of course).
Chihei has an anachronistic aversion to electronic instrumentation (although clearly not to heavy sound processing). Saunter is constructed largely from almost unrecognizable piano but there are occasional contributions from vibraphones and field recordings as well. The opening “Treads Echoing Far Away From Sea Coast” is built around what sounds like backwards, heavily reverbed piano and texturally calls to mind Harold Budd. However, Hatakeyama’s compositions are much more abstract than Budd’s: there is very little in the way of rhythm or structured chord progressions here. Each song on Saunter is essentially a melodically static, soft-focus cloud of shimmering drones and swells. They are surprisingly vibrant clouds though: clear notes continually burst forth from the quavering aural fog and demand attention like a splash of color across a black and white photograph. That said, “Treads” is a very representative microcosm, as the rest of the album falls very firmly in the same vein, Occasionally, however, other elements (such as the acoustic guitars in “A Stone Inside The Box” and the closer “Landscape On a Hill”) find their way into the mix. Generally, the album is a series of endlessly drifting, blurry, impressionist swaths of sound.
Hatakeyama has undeniably crafted an intriguing and enjoyable album and has done many unusual things with space, structure, and instrumentation. Saunter is too polite and tranquil for me, however, to take in large doses. I suspect that Hatakeyama will always be an artist that I respect, but not an artist that I actually listen to regularly (unless I somehow achieve a Zen-like calm and supernaturally heightened appreciation of nuance).
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