What I love about Haruomi Hosono’s music is that it’s so evocative. When you listen to Hosono House you can easily imagine the house it was recorded in. Paraiso really does make you feel like you’re in some kind of alien tropical paradise after dark. “Dark Side of the Star” somehow puts you right there, a million miles away from Earth. I’m not sure how he does it but nearly everything he records has that quality. Which I think makes his ambient stuff very interesting, since the less music there is the more of yourself you have to bring. This tends to produce a very strange reaction in some people.
You can see this in the resurgence of Watering a Flower, one of Hosono’s ambient works which features one of the weirdest comment sections in all of YouTube. Half the comments are things like “this makes me feel like a duck who’s unable to quack” and the other half are “I suffer from severe depression and this is the only thing that makes me feel normal”. What’s funny about that is that the “album”, as it were, is just two looped 15-minute pieces which were commissioned as background music for a store called Muji. Hosono probably banged them out in a day and hadn’t thought about them since. It was released on cassette, which nobody had and nobody really wanted, until for whatever reason the YouTube algorithm started to randomly suggest it to a bunch of people. Now this has a million and a half views and has kickstarted a bunch of interest into “the other YMO guy”. It got the attention of Vampire Weekend, who sampled it on their Father of the Bride album.
What does this do for you? I suppose it may depend on what generation you belong to. For those of us born in the 80’s (as the guys from Vampire Weekend were) it probably makes you think of lying in bed with your Game Boy and how strange that music could make you feel. I can’t imagine what people would’ve thought of it in 1984, or if it made them feel anything at all. It actually seems kind of terrible as background music for what I gather is like a Japanese version of Target. This does not make me want to buy anything. It makes me want to go look at frogs. It makes me think of those early moments of self-awareness and that sense of living in a world you don’t really belong to. It also makes me feel like my entire life has passed me by, but in a way that fills you with this quiet hope. It’s sad and wistful but not in a way that makes you feel anxiety. It’s sort of like a blanket shielding you from the outside world. Does any of this make sense to you?
Anyway, I’m mostly speaking of the first track here called “Talking”, which is what you get on this 12 inch single, along with two takes of Vampire Weekend’s version (it’s good, but the original recording is so pure that putting anything on top feels like sacrilege). By the way if you’re new to Hosono’s work I need to point out that there are some pretty similar tracks on his Monad albums, particularly “Bio Philosophy” and “Birdoj”. It is essentially the same melody. There is another track called “Growth” which reminds me a lot of those early Popol Vuh Moog experiments. I am guessing Hosono didn’t have a Moog but it’s the same kind of sound (and general tunelessness). I wish they could’ve made it the B-side, but alas. Without the Vampire Weekend version this probably doesn’t get made at all. Still, if “Talking” is having an existential moment while walking around a garden then “Growth” is doing the same thing while floating in outer space. On YouTube they add a 3rd track called “Original BGM”, which is also great. I think it was made for the same purpose but it wasn’t unearthed until 2000 when it appeared on a compilation made by Muji themselves. This time the melody is “Dark Side of the Star”, but on synths instead of pianos, and it’s also 15 minutes long. You can also hear it as the last track on Kankyo Ongaku, which I highly recommend if you’re into this kind of music at all.
There’s something off about giving this a vinyl release – this is the kind of music for which the aura of mystery is actually kind of essential. So buy it, but pretend you actually found it in the basement at an estate sale or something. Sometimes music is just a weird reflection of one’s self. I don’t know how else you’d describe something like this.
Critter Jams 
Leave a comment