Minima Moralia

Is it possible to have too much "____" music? I often ask myself this question as I look through my CD collection and try to decide if I need to get rid of anything. Many times, I scan across CD after CD of ambient music and that question lingers. After all, ambient music isn't engaging in the ways that other releases are, but I find myself keeping huge amounts of ambient releases anyway, as if I'm waiting for the time when I'll need to go on a two month beatless bender.

The truth is that I've thought about why a person needs so much ambient music often, and I've come to the conclusion that it's because the pace of the world has sped up so much that I increasingly need moments where soothing ambience is there to clear my head just a bit. Despite not being as directly engaging as something with a forthright beat, there is a wide scope of ambient music, and those finely tuned moods seem to be needed (to me at least) to match up with my variety of come-down periods.

Now that I've gone and derailed a bit, I should just go ahead and say that Chihei Hatakeyama is the newest artist on the Kranky label. In addition to being a member of the electro-acoustic trio Opitope, he has been experimenting with similar sounding work on his own for some time before releasing this, his debut album. Although he relies heavily on processing on the release, it's different in the work of many artists in that all the sounds were created from organic means such as electric and acoustic guitar and vibraphone. It's this small detail that gives the album a warm and soothing feel, and his evocative song titles suggest little moments in the day that he's seemingly tried to capture in sound.

"Bonfire On The Field" opens the release with hushed crystalline tones that flutter and flourish into a sustained wash while "Swaying Curtain In The Window" opens with more overlapping tones before cascading guitar notes fall over one another before dissolving into a warm haze. On "Towards A Tranquil Marsh" and "Inside Of The Pocket," warm acoustic guitar and micro electronic pulses are joined by violin from Masahiro Kobayashi and the results are even more stunning. Basically, if you're one of those people who can't seem to get enough ambient music, Minima Moralia is going to be a release that you'll want to hunt down. Along with Brian McBride's When The Detail Lost It's Freedom, Christopher Bissonette's Periphery and Windy & Carl's The Dream House, Kranky has been on a roll this past year with great minimal ambient releases.

(from almost cool music reviews)

MARK TEPPO's igloomag.com REVIEW ::
(02.23.06) Chihei Hatakeyama evokes a purity of sound on Minima Moralia, his first release for Kranky. In keeping with the label's recent trend towards drones and minimalism, Hatakeyama's record is a series of velvety sonic landscapes, broad washes of processed tones and elongated chimes. Sourced from guitar and vibraphone, the music is stretched flat via laptop processing and then spread out until it is so thin that it becomes vaporous.

"Bonfire on the Field," at over eight minutes in length, spends more than six of that simply rising from silence. Only in the last two minutes does a light rustling of sound creep out of the drone tone as if a slow dawn has finally cast enough light on a field to warm a dead fire. Hatakeyama's titles, in a manner unusual these days in electronic music, actually evoke a sense of the music. "Swaying Curtain in the Window," filled with diaphanous tones, twinkles with tiny motes of melody like sunlight winking through the gentle motion of a curtain. As more of a breeze kicks up the curtain, the melodies become more realized, transforming from light vibraphone notes to flowing runs on an acoustic guitar. "Sunlight Reflecting On The Surface Of The River" is dappled with tiny reverb, miniscule elements of back-masking and hitched glitch that echo across the sparkling tones.

"Towards a Tranquil Marsh" clicks with the circadian buzz of small insects and glittering lightning bugs before the tones evolve into melodies of guitar and violin; while "Granular Haze" undulates like a ribbon of smoke through a crisp winter sky where it chases distant chimes and is, in turn, pursued by the soft rumble of atmospheric pressure ridges. "Inside Of The Pocket" is a more personalized rendition of "Towards a Tranquil Marsh." Guitar and violin work together again but the gritty noises and hiss of animal life is more immediate. It is only in "Beside A Well" that Hatakeyama ventures into static and detritus as his long waves disintegrate into hissing noise.

I may have poor acoustics or just crappy speakers on the home system, but Minima Moralia didn't really move me until I listened to it on headphones. In an isolated environment, the sonic depths opened up and the ambience became pervasive and enfolding. Hatakeyama's efforts came alive when I fell into them. They are spaces where I drifted quite happily.

Snippets of sounds from accoustic instruments are processed and arranged without melody or rhythm. Where other ambient artists go for the slowing down via half-speed tape players of computers, this artist cuts them into fragments and seems to let a breeze blow them into their own organic arrangements like electronic wind chimes. Very good.

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