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The tension between agitation and stillness is at the centre of Masayoshi Fujita’s work. The vibraphonist and marimba player’s 2021 album, Bird Ambience, recognised the paradoxical state of the natural world: its calming, meditative qualities and its propensity for violence and movement. Fujita improvised with highly controlled passages to create a music that approached the world from two different angles simultaneously. On Migratory, he explores these ideas further, and on a more personal level.
In 2020, Fujita returned to his native Japan after thirteen years in Berlin and moved with his family to the rural, mountainous coast north-west of Kyoto, where he turned an old kindergarten into the recording studio where he would eventually create Migratory. The album, fittingly, is defined by its sense of flux and of growth. Comforting ambience meets melodic exploration, with the vibraphone and marimba fleshed out by subtle electronics and the sparing use of guest vocalists.
One of the guest vocalists, American singer, poet and activist Moor Mother, appears on Our Mother’s Lights, and ends her performance with the words ‘What if I told you/that we can just be/all of us.’ It is a passionate cri de coeur for openness and personal acceptance which feels both specific and universal, and as such is the perfect fit for this deceptively layered album. Our Mother’s Lights is an incredibly beautiful piece of music, with Fujita’s percussion rippling out in all directions at once, while Moor Mother’s spoken word performance is both soft and powerful.
The album’s other vocal performance comes from London-based Japanese singer Hatis Noit. Her singing lends an ethereal folkiness to the minimal Higurashi. The result is immensely powerful, hymnlike, full of an intangible and slightly uncanny nostalgia which is heightened by the hints of melody that Fujita introduces towards the end.
The instrumental pieces too are full of these moments of often breathtaking beauty. Opener Tower of Cloud makes prodigious use of synths to create a piece that feels epic but ends up being defined by its delicacy. It has the feel of something that could be played over the end credits of one of Studio Ghibli’s more fantastical films. Pale Purple builds from an uncomfortable drone into a lush soundscape full of stippled vibraphone notes. Blue Rock Thrush begins stridently before settling into languid pace that allows for some interesting melodies to develop against the sweeping backdrop, dense with saxophones.
Novelist Pico Iyer, who wrote the sleeve notes for Migratory, stresses the need for attention when listening to Fujita’s music. This is important: you can enjoy this album in a casual way, but a deeper listen enables you to recognise the many layers that make it so interesting and so unique. The devil, very often, is in the detail: the way the background sounds come to the forefront on the sinuous Desonata; the marine splash that runs through Ocean Flow, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes building and swelling like a tide; the melodic filigree of Distant Planet with its nursery rhyme simplicity.
Another important component on three of the album’s tracks is Mattias Hållsten’s shō. It helps give a yearning grandiosity to In A Sunny Meadow, and lends extra depth to Pale Purple. Hållsten also features on the closing track Yodaka, which has an almost Tangerine Dream-like swell of proggy ambience, but without any sense of self-conscious musicality. In fact, the entire album seems to exist elementally rather than as the product of a craft or an industry. It is the opposite of vulgar, whatever that might be, utterly light, itself a part of the landscape.
Migratory (6th September 2024) Erased Tapes
Bandcamp: https://masayoshifujita.bandcamp.com/album/migratory
