Takashi Asahina Beethove

The Japanese approach to sound is all encompassing - fictional characters, brands, ideas, even inanimate objects like printers and whiskey have their own theme tunes and original music created specifically for them. This is referred to as an "image album", an audio impression designed to give a multi-sensory experience.
In 1987, Japanese composer and environmental sound designer Takashi Kokubo was enlisted to create the music for a new line of high-end air Sanyo air-conditioners. Though his name might be unfamiliar, alongside his anime soundtracks and avant-garde projects, Kokubo has also crafted music that has impacted virtually all of Japan, from national mobile phone earthquake alerts to contactless card payment jingles.

Japanese label Triton has released a Pascal Rogé album with a rather remarkable program; Crystal Dream features the eminent French pianist in a program that interweaves short piano pieces by Erik Satie with others written by contemporary Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu, mostly pieces drawn from his Pleiades Dances. Both composers employ relatively simple melodic concepts harmonized with elegant, though elemental, kinds of accompaniments, so perhaps the combination makes sense. On the other hand, Satie never lived into the age of rock-based pop music, his engagement with the popular consisting mainly of French music hall tunes, and later in life, a sort of half-understood perception of ragtime rhythm. Yoshimatsu, however, would not be Yoshimatsu if it weren't for his strong connection to pop, though admittedly in Satie's case the pop group Blood, Sweat & Tears' adaptation of his Gymnopédie No. 1 once earned Satie a Grammy-winning single. Either way, one might wonder "how does this combination-slash-conversation work?"

The Japanese approach to sound is all encompassing - fictional characters, brands, ideas, even inanimate objects like printers and whiskey have their own theme tunes and original music created specifically for them. This is referred to as an "image album", an audio impression designed to give a multi-sensory experience.
In 1987, Japanese composer and environmental sound designer Takashi Kokubo was enlisted to create the music for a new line of high-end air Sanyo air-conditioners. Though his name might be unfamiliar, alongside his anime soundtracks and avant-garde projects, Kokubo has also crafted music that has impacted virtually all of Japan, from national mobile phone earthquake alerts to contactless card payment jingles.

Along with Wit's Naxos recording, this is one of the best versions of Messiaen's phantasmagoric Turangalîla-Symphonie available, and it's very different: swifter, more obviously virtuosic in concept, perhaps a touch less warm in consequence, and engineered with greater “in your face” immediacy. The playing of the Concertgebouw, always a wonderful Messiaen orchestra, is stunning throughout. Chailly revels in the music's weirdness. The Ondes Martinot, for example, is particularly well captured. It's interesting how earlier performances tended to minimize its presence, perhaps for fear that is would sound silly, which of course it does, redeemed by the composer's utter seriousness and obliviousness to anything that smacks of humor. In any case, it's not all noise and bluster. The Garden of Love's Sleep is gorgeous, hypnotic, but happily still flowing, while the three Turangalîla rhythmic studies have remarkable clarity. Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays the solo piano part magnificently, really as well as anyone else ever has.

WRWTFWW Records is very happy to present a new collaborative album by Japanese ambient/environmental legend Takashi Kokubo (Ion Series) and Italian & Swiss trombonist Andrea Esperti (Esperti Project): Music For A Cosmic Garden.

John Dowland - Sorrow Stay - Mutsumi Hatano & Takashi Tsunoda (1992) {Pardon Japan TH4628}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 165 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 112 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 152 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1992 Pardon Japan | TH4628
Classical / Renaissance / Vocal / Lute

Mutsumi Hatano and Takashi Tsunoda began performing the lute songs of John Dowland together in 1990, and since then have never failed to enrapture audiences with their unique combination of Mutsumi's clear, expressive voice and the delicacy of Takashi's lute accompaniment, overflowing with emotion. In addition to the Dowland songs and other old English songs, their repertoire spans the renaissance to the baroque, including Italian madrigals, French air de cour and Spanish songs with vihuela accompaniment, and to each a new charm and vitality is introduced.