| 2025 repress "A love letter to the masters of Japanese ambient and environmental music." During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, theyd leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyo Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. "It was a kind of algorithmic magic," he says. Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyo Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. "I had the sensation that for many years, I'd been doing something similar to the style," he explains. |
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