About

In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.

Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.

Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.

Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.

Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.

As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.

Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his recording journey in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.

Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu. — (via Label)

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In the liner notes for his seminal album Music For Airports, Brian Eno wrote that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Before him, French composer Erik Satie, whose musique d’ameublement (‘furniture music’) prefigured ambient, reportedly used to get angry if his compositions drew too much attention. Ambient music, then, has long occupied a strange space. It should reward deep listening without demanding it; operate with presence, but not insistence.

This is a paradox that sits at the heart of Sen’nyū, the latest effort from Japanese ambient bodach Meitei. Inspired by Japanese onsen culture, it’s an album with place as its central tenet. And it’s best enjoyed in the bath.

The record, released on Singapore’s Kitchen Label, is part of a wider set of works from Meitei that chronicle “Lost Japan” (or Shitsu-nihon). For Sen’nyū, Meitei exiled himself to a warehouse just outside Beppu, a city in Kyushu known for its status as a popular onsen resort. There, invited to make music for Beppu’s 100th anniversary, and equipped with nothing but a microphone, Meitei got lost in onsen landmarks for days on end, intensely listening to the sounds of steam, sedimentary rock and public baths. The experience makes for an album that comes alive like molecules changing state from water to steam.

A large part of the Shitsu-nihon concept, and Sen’nyū in particular, is the incorporation of field recordings into tracks. These snippets of onsen culture – trickling water taps, whistling tree branches, spectral gongs – are what allow Meitei to quietly fold his listener into the ambience. The album’s opener, named after the Ichinoyu Onsen, is peppered with audiological onsen symbols, which sound against flutes, drones and metallic objects. It all congeals into an ASMR-like, watery body: unceasingly relaxing, but numinous and vivid enough to claw an ounce of sentience out of you. Right when it feels like you want nothing more but to sink into the unhurried three-note progressions, the transitory open chords and the bath, Meitei will introduce the perfect misshapen lead for the moment, a windswept field recording – or, oftentimes, rescind into complete, all-encompassing soundscape.

Sen’nyū’s efficacy also lies in its ability to rise out of the onsen baths and into the cold air of hauntological Japan. The work, in all its murmurous, moth-eaten glory, serves as a constant reminder of the power music can hold in allowing its listeners to contextualise and make sense of the spaces around them – not only as a preservation tool for a singular, deeply meaningful practice like onsen, but also a means to piece together a fractured cultural memory through art, thought, and close collaboration between place, person and sound.

In its own quiet way, Sen’nyū asks us to remain awake to the textures of our surroundings – to listen to everything, all the time. And, when we catch ourselves drifting, to gently return. — (via The Quietus)

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Label: Kitchen. Label
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Released: 2025
Genre: Electronic
Style: Experimental, Ambient

File under: Japanese Electronic
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