Music for Nine Post Cards

Yoshimura began by looking out of a window and playing, matching what he saw with short phrases a single measure long. After a visit to the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, a 1938 mansion by the architect Jin Watanabe that had become a museum in 1979, he conceived the pieces as environmental music for it, and the first copy was a demo for the museum to play in the building. The title refers to nine spots in the museum where he suggested the pieces be heard. He recorded it alone at home on Fender Rhodes and other keyboards, multi-tracking every part, and designed the sleeve himself. His liner notes name clouds, the shade of a tree in summer, rain and snow in a town as its inspirations. Ashikawa's notes warned that the age was flooded with sound and asked listeners to care for what they hear as they would for architecture or the air.

It came out as Wave Notation 1 (WN 001), the first of three Sound Process LPs. It was reissued on CD in Japan in 1999 and 2011, and in 2017 Empire of Signs issued it outside Japan for the first time, remastered from the original tapes by John Baldwin, with the liner notes translated and new notes by Yoko Yoshimura, Spencer Doran and Maxwell August Croy. Pitchfork gave it 8.5, Resident Advisor compared it with Fripp and Eno's Evening Star and Eno's Thursday Afternoon and heard Satie and Debussy in its second half, and Crack placed it among seven essential Japanese ambient records.