When Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura made the music on Flora, he was just about with out peer on the earth of ambient music. Album to album and concept to concept, his solely competitors circa 1987 may need been Steve Roach, however whereas that Californian motocross aficionado approached his work with the auteurist fury you’d affiliate with somebody like Brian Wilson, Yoshimura was joyful making music that resembled the sounds of leaves blowing within the wind or animals rustling within the underbrush. Maybe the boldness with which he approaches his concepts on Flora, in distinction to the clear strains and easy strokes that outline his earlier work, explains why he by no means launched these items; they had been solely posthumously compiled in 2006, three years after his passing. Yoshimura was a working musician keenly attuned to music’s utilitarian elements; his 1986 masterpiece Encompass was initially supposed as a soundtrack to a sequence of prefab houses. Nevertheless it’s arduous to think about Flora as useful music: These items bloom and sprawl in each path, planting roots within the ear as an alternative of merely accentuating the area during which they’re being performed.
Flora is being reissued by Temporal Drift, which put out a vinyl version of Encompass in 2023 and frames Flora because the “chronological and stylistic follow-up” to that album. Yoshimura would possibly bristle at the concept his work might slot into such a tidy narrative, however Flora additionally challenges the picture of the Japanese composer as a practical freelancer. Flora is essentially the most album-like of his releases, within the sense of taking the listener on a journey fairly than present in area like Encompass or the runway soundtrack Pier & Loft. There are bits the place the music fades right into a rosy blur within the corners of the unconscious, as when the druidic nighttime music of “Asagao” smears into the temporary piano étude “Ojigisou,” however extra typically it pokes on the ear like a mischievous sprite. “Over the Clover” opens with a leap-frog synth melody as playful as something Yoshimura composed, however when a loudly blended saloon piano performs a spectacularly ungraceful grace notice, you’re in for a messier pay attention than you often get from this most meticulous musician.
The album’s 11 tracks really feel like a set of gardens opening onto extra gardens. The songs aren’t exceptionally lengthy by Yoshimura’s requirements, usually 5 or 6 minutes, however fairly than thrumming within the air, just like the immovable items on his debut Music for 9 Put up Playing cards, they unfurl. Each time “Over the Clover” threatens to get misplaced in its personal thickets, it finds its approach again to its introductory riff, a easy and stylish melody in league together with his much-loved standout “Blink.” The title monitor is constructed on cottony electrical piano puffs so delicate they would appear to blow away within the wind and scatter pell-mell, but they keep robust all through a six-minute epic. “Maple Syrup Manufacturing unit” is past pleasant, a sojourn to the American wilderness painted in festive artificial pianos and bitter angel choirs. Better of all is “Adelaide,” which begins as a easy and true synth piece much like Roach’s “Buildings from Silence” or Aphex Twin’s “#3” after which step by step will get dirtier: a brookish trickle right here, a droplet there, till its virtually unnatural perfection is changed by one thing extra lifelike.
