Hiroshi Yoshimura

The Japanese composer and sound designer who wrote Music for Nine Post Cards for a Tokyo museum, helped bring environmental music to Japan, and found a world audience only after his death.

Origin
Yokohama, Japan
Years active
1965-2003
Genres
ambient, kankyō ongaku, electronic
Labels
Sound Process, AIR Records, Empire of Signs, Light in the Attic, Temporal Drift
Also known as
吉村弘

Beginnings

Hiroshi Yoshimura was born in Yokohama on 22 October 1940 and began piano at five, as the Second World War was ending. In high school he found his way into music through the scores of Erik Satie, whose idea of furniture music stayed with him. He also cited Fluxus, Harry Partch and John Cage's 1962 visit to Japan. He graduated from the art department of Waseda University's Second Faculty of Letters in 1964, and his work never kept to one field: he composed, designed sound, built sound objects, drew graphic scores, wrote concrete poetry and published books.

In the late 1960s he made instruction pieces and scores such as Three Forest Events (1968), for flowers, a bell and bird voices, and Fresh Wind (1969), which replaced the staff lines with squares. In 1972 he founded the computer music group Anonyme. Toy piano pieces and music-box recordings followed, and he performed with Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki. A performance from 24 March 1977, Continuous Performance No. 3, came out the next year as a limited, numbered LP.

Environmental music

His first public commission came from the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Moved by the building and the trees in its courtyard, he wrote nine short pieces as environmental music for it, among them Clouds and Blink. Visitors kept asking how to get the music, so his producer Satoshi Ashikawa released it in 1982 on his label Sound Process as Music for Nine Post Cards. The 2023 retrospective calls it the first ambient record released in Japan, and Fashion Press credits it with spreading the term kankyō ongaku, environmental music, across the country. Ashikawa died in a car accident in July 1983, aged 30.

Much of what followed was made for places and companies. Pier & Loft (1983) came out on cassette, A.I.R. (Air in Resort) was an LP given away by Shiseido in 1984, and Soundscape 1: Surround (1986) was commissioned by Misawa Home for its show homes. He made in-store sound for Seibu Ikebukuro and environmental sound for the Kushiro City Museum. Green (1986), recorded on Yamaha synthesizers over the winter of 1985, was one of his own favourites.

Sound for the city

Through the 1990s much of his work was sound design, often with the audio company TOA. In 1991 he wrote the departure and approach sounds for the Namboku Line of the Tokyo subway, a departure melody later taken up by the Toei Mita Line and the Saitama Rapid Railway. Commissions for Yokohama International Stadium, the observation deck of Osaka International Airport and the Kobe subway's Kaigan Line followed. He wrote books on the sounds of the city, starting with 都市の音 (Sounds of the City) in 1990, and lectured at Chiba University and Kunitachi College of Music.

Quiet Forest (1996), inspired by his first visit to the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park, was his last full-length album. His final work was Four Post Cards, a sound logo for the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, which still plays as the galleries open and close each day. He died of skin cancer on 23 October 2003, aged 63. His widow, Yoko Yoshimura, looks after the estate.

Revival

Outside Japan he was barely known until YouTube uploads of his records found a new audience. Wikipedia credits changes to YouTube's algorithm in 2017, and FACT a rip of the CD version of Green. Spencer Doran, who first heard him on A.I.R., said he had found a musician almost nobody had heard of. Doran and Maxwell August Croy's label Empire of Signs reissued Music for Nine Post Cards in 2017, the album's first release outside Japan, and Doran put Blink on the Grammy-nominated compilation Kankyō Ongaku in 2019.

Light in the Attic's WATER COPY imprint, named after the album's opening track, reissued Green in 2020, and Temporal Drift has since issued Surround, Flora and Quiet Forest. In 2023, twenty years after his death, the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura Annex, showed more than 200 of his works and archive items. Its curator, Saki Nagato, called him the first musician to make work consciously about the relationship between sound, architecture and the city.

Records

Songs

Satoshi Ashikawa, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, Mary Lattimore

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

  • NTS Radio plays of his music and the shows that played it.

Film and video

Sources

  1. Hiroshi Yoshimura, Wikipedia
  2. 吉村弘, Wikipedia (Japanese)
  3. Hiroshi Yoshimura: Music for Nine Post Cards, Resident Advisor (2017-12-22)
  4. Japanese ambient: Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada, FACT (2018-01-14)
  5. Hiroshi Yoshimura: Ambience of Sound, Sound of Ambience, e-flux (2023-09-08)
  6. Hiroshi Yoshimura retrospective report, Tokyo Art Beat (2023-05)
  7. Hiroshi Yoshimura exhibition, Fashion Press