Stadiums & Shrines
Air of Japan

 

“…all environmental sound and non-sound begin to have a meaning to me and the sound begins to shine.”

Above is the music and the words of Michiru Aoyama. Both are in reference to the composer’s regular practice of meditation in Zen Buddhism. Matched with Prelinger-sourced infrared footage, “日本の空気 (Air of Japan)” illuminates those shining subtleties in hyper-awareness. The four minutes works well as a standalone zone-out, but we also recommend letting them open up a nice half-hour of textural ambient and static drone at bandcamp via Hamburg-based label Organic Industries.

Kiss

 

Alone; a vibrant desire, a glimmer so high…

The art of floral arrangement known as Ikebana inevitably comes up here when highlighting a project that shares its name, and its principles—”minimalism, beauty in space, calmness…”. The parallels are immediate; “Kiss” enchants with restraint, its chords plucked almost as selectively as its words. The message is sincere, and as focused as its title. The pacing is unforced, its end result reaching somewhere uniquely sublime.

The song appears on the Japanese female duo’s LP when you arrive there, due out July 8th via Flau.

Dreams of Israel

 

Moons rest low enough to touch. Everything; all walls and walkways, even the luminescent spheres themselves, porcelain.

Men wander the labyrinth of labyrinths of labyrinths, peaking in and out of corridors. Passing the same markets again and again and again… they pick up telephones, only to meet the vacant hiss of the exiled. Omnipresent mantras tangle in the shadings of stone and menacing branches.

They find doors within doors within doors, confronting interiors far larger than spatial reasoning would suggest. Beyond one frame, a desert fortress overlooks the Dead Sea at high noon, a panning mirage. Inside another, the scene repeats from the opposite vantage, hours later, glistening under moons partially submerged in salt. Through the next, a threshold brightens at dawn, clearing the fortress and the sea overhead, its reflection cycling from speck to surge—cumalitively, again, rippling porcelain without end.

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Recycle Culture is the project of an Erik, whose whereabouts for now remain simply on the World Wide Web, in a collection of masterful downtempo and uptempo work found at bandcamp.

Lines

 

Inanimate to an unfocused eye, yet, if an ear were pressed against it…

As evidenced by the smooth, barely-varying pulse of its soundcloud wave, Solar Year‘s “Lines” is completely, and quite serenely, flattened here by Heathered Pearls. While such a treatment could risk erasing identity, this one preserves just enough—somewhere in that hum is a crucial trace of the original, the lines carry on.

Waverly, their 2012 debut, is set for re-release on vinyl June 25th via Ceremony (US) and Splendour (EU). Jakub’s own Loyal LP is available through Ghostly.