It was 2:00 am when I had finally found my way to Nakano. I was exhausted from my roughly 15 hour journey to Tokyo, but enveloped by a steady calmness. The airport had seemed abandoned that late in the day: videos of life-sized Pikachus dancing to commemorate our arrival and a group of local retirees that spoke fluent english to help us fill out papers were the only company we got. The path to my residence seemed a little less guided, as I had heard from a close friend that she was initially lost in the vast subway system, succumbing to the stress, with an elderly couple comforting and helping out. Maybe it was my stubbornness, that I immediately understood the assignment of the railway system with all its intuitive quirks, but I got to Nakano without effort. Here, in the middle of the night, the air seemed different, the light seemed to fracture beckoningly – a soul within all things. Maybe it was the lack of sleep and solid food, the heaviness of my suitcase, the sense of adventure that spikes my adrenaline, but I had rarely felt this at home. A young woman – immaculately dressed in the middle of the night – crossed my path, scanning me briefly: a gaijin dressed in suit, vest and tie. Alone, again, the light of a 7-Eleven drew me in, the store spitting me back out. The city still had sounds.
I’ve never felt quite at home, since. Not to overtly romanticise a nation with its own struggles and quarrels – which Japan has many, often addressed by the young locals that feel so very not represented by their place of origin – but the sense of comfort and peace that oozes from even the darkest back-alley is unique to it. So one has to make do with the brief islands of respite: the occasional izakaya or sushi bar, the inspired sweater, the architectural reference, the vinyl record’s OBI-strip, the overpriced €4 soda that tastes quite like it is supposed to, yet nothing like those days. Call it nostalgia, but it is valid. Even if it is just a spark to light memories.
maya ongaku‘s new album Nothing Space Music has managed to fill the void better than many other things. The trio’s second combines their psychedelic folk with elements of ambient and brief hints of jazz to create the impression of floating leisure. Hailing from, and located in, Enoshima – a tiny island that’s part of the seaside town Fujisawa – the group wanted to explore ideas of the in-between, those intangible spaces that are located between the palpable absolutes of set boundaries: “nothing spaces”.
To realise this sound, the trio built their own, self-made studio near a shrine. Here, they followed a concept called Shizen hassei, roughly translated to “spontaneous generation”, which explores the idea that non-living things can generate life. Popular in the 17th century – but going as far back as Aristotle’s presumption that some animals are borne from substances, not parents, the theory has been disproven by science – yet existing within a cosmos that is vast and impenetrable, there’s legitimate questions the conscious mind must ask: how can we come from stardust that, guided through physics, melts into atoms and matter to finally create a body that perceives? God?
Let’s not get too nostalgic for antiquated beliefs, but still: for an imaginary outsider who is able to see all time within a moment, if he were to speed up the universe’s existence from the big bang to this very second, occurring in one swift moment, the appearance would be that of magic. So maybe maya ongaku are not quite wrong to investigate this concept when attempting to capture ‘nothing spaces’.
Aesthetically, the album can most closely be linked to Big Thief’s U.F.O.F., – with hints of Air and Red House Painters present – collecting a warm glow of incidental beauty that invites studio ambience and field recordings to complete deeply layered compositions that use the quiet reverberations of instruments to give the impressions of spaces: enclosed nocturnal rooms, summer forest nights, the vastness of the sea. For those familiar with the Japanese Folk movement, Itsutsu No Akai Fusen’s Flight is a more apt comparison, but maya ongaku strive for a more elusive radiance.
“Astral Echoes”, with its 70s instrumentation and jazzy aura, gives a nice initial idea of this aesthetic: the song immediately lures the listener in with its warm, humble impressionism, which incorporates quiet bells and chimes far in the background, generating a dream-like immediacy. The bass, piano and brass (I suspect clarinet, but could be wrong) led “Hisoku Blue” comes with a steady groove, finding a suburban swagger, transgressing into the ambience of crashing waves and the song of birds of the interlude “In Nothing Space”.
“Thinkingspace” develops its mysterious key melody, similar to the tunes of Ichiko Aoba, with the grace and wonder of fireflies, building to a psychedelic, sitar infused finish. The gorgeous “Flowing” reduces the instrumentation to mostly guitars and keyboards, with short, quiet bursts of sonics that occur and cut out like dancing sparks above a campfire – just as “You are Silence”, which adapts the brief, piercing sounds to guide its motions forward.
Nothing Space Music is a special record. Like many works of Japanese minimalism, it transports the listener into an aesthetic philosophy that seems counter-intuitive to the western hegemony of rationalism and ego. Yes, it is rich in nostalgia for a soulful perception that modern life seems content to ignore – the moments where we hear summer crickets from our windows, suddenly in harmony, before the shrill sound of ambulances in the distance invades the brief elysium. Finding those spaces in-between seems harder the more worn down we become, so evidently the connection to far eastern spiritualism seems a fair entrance to this other realm. Y
et, there are parallels: as I wrote the section on nostalgia earlier, something weird happened. The outside world cut down into silence. As I ventured out to explore, onto a nearby bridge, I found a few hundred people observing a partial eclipse. The sun would not go out, but briefly become a tiny arch above the moon. Not quite day, not night, but curious in-between. Spectacle, maybe – but then, humanity decides to stop for a minute, and commit itself to the forces of nature.
As I walked away from the masses, I realised the power of absence and the desire for a world where our kind can live in harmony with planets that elude our grasp. The sun and moon don’t need us to meet each other – we are merely spectators. Not quite as grandiose or archaic, Nothing Space Music is the inversion of this motion: maya ongaku present the appreciation of environments that need us to listen to them, that co-exist and co-compose. Maybe, I wonder, that young woman in Nakano did not scan me as gaijin, as foreign object, but as a piece of a larger puzzle that solves itself.
