When Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura made the music on Flora, he was just about with out peer on this planet of ambient music. Album to album and concept to concept, his solely competitors circa 1987 might 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 glad 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 traces 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 features; his 1986 masterpiece Encompass was initially meant as a soundtrack to a sequence of prefab properties. However it’s laborious to think about Flora as practical music: These items bloom and sprawl in each course, planting roots within the ear as a substitute of merely accentuating the house by 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 may 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 current in house 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 transient 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 word, you realize you’re in for a messier hear than you normally 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, sometimes 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 elegant melody in league along 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 sturdy all through a six-minute epic. “Maple Syrup Manufacturing facility” 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 “Constructions from Silence” or Aphex Twin’s “#3” after which progressively will get dirtier: a brookish trickle right here, a droplet there, till its virtually unnatural perfection is changed by one thing extra lifelike.
