The meticulous design of Japanese environmental music
The story behind the architectural minimalism of kankyō ongaku - a genre which blurs the lines between music and environmental sound.
Almost exactly five years ago, Light In The Attic released a compilation collecting a number of important works of ‘kankyō ongaku’ – a strand of Japanese minimalism that emerged in the 1980s to soundtrack the architectural wonders and commercial advancements of the country’s economic boom years. Drawing explicitly from the rhythms and timbres of the natural world and designed to dissolve back into it, kankyō ongaku covers everything from site-specific compositions to audio works produced for commercial products, like Takashi Kokubo’s Get At The Wave, made for a new series of luxury Sanyo air-conditioning units.
In the words of composer Satoshi Ashikawa, “this music could be said to be an object or sound scenery to be listened to casually. Not being music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener’s activity.”
At their best, compilations such as these can open up entire ecosystems of music you may not previously have been aware of, drawing lines and making connections that you can begin to follow and explore further on your own. Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 [to give it its full title] provided me with one of those moments, and I have returned regularly to its musicians and the ideas which underpinned their work ever since.
Shortly after its release in February 2019, I interviewed the compilation’s curator Spencer Doran over email for a feature in The Vinyl Factory, the online magazine I was editing at the time. My questions came from a place of curiosity rather than expertise, and five years on, I thought it would be nice to share an abridged version of the interview.
The title of the compilation [Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990] makes a point to delineate the music’s stylistic strands as ‘ambient, environmental and new age music’. What differentiates these genres for you and why were they grouped together?
It’s a good way of mapping the three different, yet overlapping, branches happening within the material represented, but in part the sub-header is also a way to separate the release from Light in the Attic’s previous two boxset compilations in this style – I Am the Center and The Microcosm. These compilations were made with the intention of mapping and re-examining the history of “new age” music in America and Europe, but it was the wrong viewpoint to approach most of this music from. “New age” generally pertains to music that was an outgrowth of the loosely defined Western spiritual movement of the same name, a movement which isn’t connected to the bulk of the material here. There is certainly a spirituality that can be felt within it, but it is far more deeply-seated and works in relation to a shared cultural history, not Western exoticism of the spiritual “other”.
Satoshi Ashikawa’s “environmental” ideas exists as an extension of sociological theory and architecture – it flows from the lineage of the ’60s/’70s Tokyo avant garde, Eno’s ambient, Satie’s furniture music, and much of this was coming from the art world or the extended universe of high-end studio pop music. Interestingly, the most traditionally “new age” material included here comes from artists that found careers in what came to be called “healing music”, who were previously involved in the 1970s psychedelic rock scene – folks like Fumio Miyashita and Akira Ito. It’s quite useful to articulate the different forms this music took, and their separate lineages as it shows that this sound wasn’t strictly a single uniform thing.
How did you choose what tracks and artists made the cut?
I wanted to tell the story of the scene and cultural landscape surrounding it – all the different permutations that the idea of ambient/environmental music went through, and the ways that it seeped into pop-culture and everyday life. There’s a very strong socio-economic dimension to a lot of this music, as it exists as a very clear extension of bubble-era hypercapitalism and the sense of lifestyle associated with it. I wanted the selections to reflect that. I decided to focus specifically on the 1980s, as the end of the bubble era in late 1990 was a pretty firm end to the financial support that helped this music flourish. Beyond that, I wanted it to flow well as a tracklist and tried my best to program it with that in mind – a mix I made in 2011 called Music Interiors was an early version of what became the compilation and a fair amount of the structure of that is still intact.
The idea of environmental sounds as music in public spaces, or for commercial/advertising purposes, could share similarities with Muzak. Why do you think this is being seen in a new light now?
Actually this couldn’t be further from the original intention of environmental music, as the movement’s conceptual architects (Kuniharu Akiyama, Ashikawa, etc) positioned the idea in direct opposition to historical notions of Muzak or Japanese BGM. For them Muzak was something excessive and deeply impersonal, whereas environmental music was deeply tuned to the space it was designed for, and devoid of a homogenised mood. It is specific, whereas Muzak is general – “other people’s music”, to use Akiyama’s phrase.
They envisioned environmental music as something that opens up a space for artistic expression, as something that affects the individual in a subtle but profound way – this is a really beautiful idea to me. There are lessons that can be learned from this distinction that we can easily apply to now, especially in Spotify’s neo-Muzak age of algorithmically-optimised non-music which permeates the modern city. We’re losing sense of the concept of music as something that is constructed for individualised experience and I think that re-examining your own internal relationship to sound in physical space is one of the keys to unravelling this.
Given that much was composed for physical spaces, context seems pretty important to each track, and many have wonderful stories behind them. Are there any stories that particularly resonated with you?
The story of Art Vivant – the record and book store that Satoshi Ashikawa helped run – is a big one that stuck with me. It was this small shop inside of a department store adjacent to a modern art gallery. In the late ’70s and early ’80s it was a huge hub for what would become the kankyō ongaku scene: they were the first place in Japan to import Eno’s ambient records and they had niche selections of avant garde and ethnographic LPs that Ashikawa would recommend to people, in addition to art and theory books. Yoshimura, Yoshio Ojima, Midori, Satsuki Shibano would all hang out there – Masahiro Sugaya sold his early demo cassettes there, Munetaka Tanaka (who co-ran Sound Process Design) was also a clerk there. I was with Yoshio, Satsuki and Midori one day when they were all reminiscing about it – “we are all children of Art Vivant,” Yoshio said. As a person who’s spent probably far too much of my life in record and book stores (on both sides of the counter), I relate with that dynamic a lot – the record store as a culture-accelerating social space, a marketplace for ideas. It was also pretty amazing to be able to hone the genesis of a movement down to such a micro level.
Do environmental sounds have any precedent in Japanese music history or was this something that was primarily imported through the music of Brain Eno and Erik Satie?
I get into this a bit in the liner notes, but there are ambient sound-design traditions like suikinkutsu (an Edo-period “water zither” found in outdoor garden design formed by dripping water in a resonant, underground pot, which is listened to indirectly as part of the garden environment) or the tradition of temple bell ringing (toki no kane) that was used to mark the passage of time in early Japanese towns. Suikinkutsu came back into favour in the ’80s after being largely forgotten for hundreds of years, and Hiroshi Yoshimura actually wrote a whole book on toki no kane, his argument being that it functioned as a prototypical form of public sound art. Also, it can be said that Eno’s approach resonated because of some inherently Japanese underpinnings: specifically, John Cage’s philosophies that were drawn from studies of Zen Buddhism. Similarly when Satie first arose in popularity in Japan, there was a sense that his musical approach already felt culturally familiar, though it’s hard to pin down exactly why that was.
Originally published in full on The Vinyl Factory. Some questions have been edited for clarity.