About

The third album from the Wave Notation environmental music series curated by Satoshi Ashikawa, following his very own Still Way and Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music For Nine Postcards. It’s quite possible that no one has loved anything more than avant-garde Japanese musicians adored French composer Erik Satie in the 1980s. Looking to escape from the intense pressures of the economic boom that had transformed the country – at one time making it the largest creditor nation in the world – Satie’s gauzy, diaphanous compositions, all of which seem to flow out from a central river of quiet, radiant emotion, provided a refuge and an alternate world. Combined with the immersive sonics of Brian Eno – who was himself inspired by Satie – soothing sounds could be created that would detoxify the harried urban zones and resanctify the degraded natural spaces of industrial-corporate Japan.

And perhaps no ‘80s Japanese musician loved Satie more than Satsuki Shibano. As a young college student, she was so taken with the composer’s work that she moved to Paris to study with pianist and writer Jean-Joel Barbier, Satie’s most indefatigable champion. After more than two years of apprenticeship, she moved back to Japan and began performing Satie’s work in her home country. So, when Sound Process label owner and Eastern ambient torch-bearer Satoshi Ashikawa approached Shibano about making an album for his crucial Wave Notation series (the first of which was Music for Nine Postcards by Hiroshi Yoshimura, whose work has also recently been reissued to much acclaim), a collection of Satie’s solo piano works was a natural fit.

Though Shibano for the most part plays the pieces faithfully and respectfully, the album isn’t so straight-ahead. Its name hints at a preoccupation with time – this isn’t just Erik Satie, but Erik Satie 1984, the date of the record’s release. The obi strip that accompanied the original Japanese pressing also gave the years of Satie’s birth and death. But the songs – 26 tracks including well-trod selections from the “Gnossiennes” and “Gymnopedies,” and lesser-known works like the “Preludes flasques (pour un chien)” – are not grouped by chronology. Instead, Shibano arranges them in alphabetical order, a counterintuitive yet charming move that the notoriously mischievous Satie doubtlessly would have found apropos. This tactic not only separates thematically grouped compositions like the “Gnossiennes,” it brings into contact songs written a lifetime, and a world, apart. Shibano mostly doesn’t indulge in such permutations, instead playing everything with a stately grace and firm touch, the high amounts of reverb and use of glowing sustain being the only real indicator of this recording’s specific time and place. — via Spectrum Culture
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Includes Japanese & English liner notes by Satsuki Shibano
Reissue supervised by Yoshio Ojima

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Label: We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records
Series: Wave Notation – 3
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue
Reissued: 2023 / Original Release: 1984
Genre: Electronic, Classical
Style: Contemporary, Minimal, Ambient

File under: Modern Classical
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