FR 172 - Mick Buckingham - Teruyuki Nobuchika - Still Air
The German Kompakt label fans produce maintaining a codified variety of shimmer/showered, clean/empowering ambient music for over fifteen years, meanwhile Oktaf, responsible for the excellent 'Lost In The Humming Air' tribute to Harold Budd, a shorter time. This 27 minute LP, by relative music newcomer Teruyuki Nobuchika, has a prim and proper seal all over it. Rooted to pristinely woven and compressed electronic music production techniques, the meaning does not become obfuscated by excess.
Firmly supplanted in the Klimek/Wolfgang Voigt (GAS) school of Kompakt 'Pop Ambient' (the series Voigt created that made this popular style of the genre, so, well, popular), Nobuchika has a relationship with air in composition that is, yes, still, like a clear spring from a watering tap. Water samples on third track "La Reve" purify this narrative. Much of the question of pure possession, or possession of purity, goes completely wacko.
In its place? Even more purity. This puzzles me. We know accept/reject feelings begin everything - not because I've never directly heard Teruyuki - I have no interest in dismissing underexposed artists - but exactly because
it is so pure as a set of sound sources, it utterly transcends logical deduction. This makes the assessment process of the record a very interesting one, because while I could lather plaudits on the "greatness", "wonderful" threshold until I'm a sycophant, this obscures the point. The best thing is that Teruyuki has made me question my own ideas.
Of course it helps that the music is astoundingly good. This album really takes me back to about 2007-2009 when I was ordering LPs and EPs from www.boomkat.com on the regular. Deaf Center, Klimek, Richard Skelton, Christian Fennesz, you know, those sorts of prolificists. Teruyuki is not prolific in contrast - this is his third solo album as far as I am aware.
The press release says "Still Air" "features electronic abstractions and classic sensitivity influences in a minimal ambient music context." This is pretty pure as a description, too. "Antilia", my favourite track (seven of eight), meanwhile, codifies all these linguistic processes into one sculpture of sound, with plenty of reverb and echo. As a whole the album works successfully to question relationships of time and nuance, sustenance and space, rhythm and delicacy, tides and grace. Descriptive metaphors for ghost ships, still air, are they there? We may never know. But in this label item, we at least have a deconstruction of the oceans of emptiness that could have resulted. This is essential.
The German Kompakt label fans produce maintaining a codified variety of shimmer/showered, clean/empowering ambient music for over fifteen years, meanwhile Oktaf, responsible for the excellent 'Lost In The Humming Air' tribute to Harold Budd, a shorter time. This 27 minute LP, by relative music newcomer Teruyuki Nobuchika, has a prim and proper seal all over it. Rooted to pristinely woven and compressed electronic music production techniques, the meaning does not become obfuscated by excess.
Firmly supplanted in the Klimek/Wolfgang Voigt (GAS) school of Kompakt 'Pop Ambient' (the series Voigt created that made this popular style of the genre, so, well, popular), Nobuchika has a relationship with air in composition that is, yes, still, like a clear spring from a watering tap. Water samples on third track "La Reve" purify this narrative. Much of the question of pure possession, or possession of purity, goes completely wacko.
In its place? Even more purity. This puzzles me. We know accept/reject feelings begin everything - not because I've never directly heard Teruyuki - I have no interest in dismissing underexposed artists - but exactly because
it is so pure as a set of sound sources, it utterly transcends logical deduction. This makes the assessment process of the record a very interesting one, because while I could lather plaudits on the "greatness", "wonderful" threshold until I'm a sycophant, this obscures the point. The best thing is that Teruyuki has made me question my own ideas.
Of course it helps that the music is astoundingly good. This album really takes me back to about 2007-2009 when I was ordering LPs and EPs from www.boomkat.com on the regular. Deaf Center, Klimek, Richard Skelton, Christian Fennesz, you know, those sorts of prolificists. Teruyuki is not prolific in contrast - this is his third solo album as far as I am aware.
The press release says "Still Air" "features electronic abstractions and classic sensitivity influences in a minimal ambient music context." This is pretty pure as a description, too. "Antilia", my favourite track (seven of eight), meanwhile, codifies all these linguistic processes into one sculpture of sound, with plenty of reverb and echo. As a whole the album works successfully to question relationships of time and nuance, sustenance and space, rhythm and delicacy, tides and grace. Descriptive metaphors for ghost ships, still air, are they there? We may never know. But in this label item, we at least have a deconstruction of the oceans of emptiness that could have resulted. This is essential.