VARIOUS ARTISTS

It all began with Erik Satie, apparently. A series of concerts held in mid-70s Tokyo celebrating the works of the French protominimalist composer had a profound effect on many of the city’s artists and musicians. Also coinciding with the release of Eno’s Music For Airports, it led to a “quiet boom” in what became known as kankyo ongaku, “environmental music”, which ran with both Satie and Eno’s ideas of music that – as the excellent sleevenotes to this firstof-its-kind comp puts it – “folded more easily into the contours of daily life.”

While much of this music remains unknown in the West, it should come as no surprise that Japan took to this concept with alacrity – Eno was strongly influenced by US theoretician and composer John Cage, and Cage himself drew from Japanese Zen Buddhism. And, of course, Japan was where much of the new technology capable of producing these digi-ambient sounds came from.

By its very nature, it would be easy for Kankyo Ongaku to function as a pleasant, non-distracting background to other activities – indeed, that’s what some of the tracks here were for designed for, as soundtracks to adverts, fashion runways, shops, and intriguingly, corporate buildings. But listen closely, and whole new sound worlds open up. Still Space by scene founder Satoshi Ashikawa is a beautiful miniature, warm flowering drones with notes like raindrops on petals, while Yoshio Ojima’s Glass Chattering is perfectly titled, a Philip Glass-esque ripple in a mirror endlessly reflecting back on itself. There are premonitions and echoes throughout – the delayed guitar and dreamy organ of Interior’s Park could be from an early 4AD album; the shimmering arpeggios of Toshifumi Hinata’s Chaconne suggest John Carpenter in an ice palace; the exquisitely delicate glass piano of Yoshio Suzuki’s Meet Me In The Sheep Meadow anticipates Selected Ambient Works-era Aphex Twin – but this is music with its own special identity and atmosphere, equally utilitarian and spiritual.