Label: All Night Flight – ANF006
Format: Vinyl, LP
Country: UK
Released: 2024
Genre: Classical
Style: Minimal, Lo-Fi, Contemporary
Absolutely beautiful LP of intimate drifting lo-fi piano nostalgia from Hokkaido’s Mashu Hayasaka on the store's own imprint.
Looking out from our corner of the musical landscape a certain kind of solo piano composition feels elemental. Satie’s miniatures invented a whole dreamtime realm of deft and delicate abstraction. And 120 years later we are still revolving slowly in the space they mapped out. This makes writing about records like this difficult. Listening feels like breathing. The responses it provokes are so deeply programmed that attempts to consciously discuss them produce a kind of profound blank. However when you hear it you know it. What makes Karla Borecky totally transporting and Max Richter totally blah? The specifics are unknowable. But part of it is balance, it is dangerous to wake a sleepwalker but you need some unexpected detail and at least a little grit to keep the dream alive. This record has that quality.
The clunk of a tape recorder begins a series of wandering happy/sad piano studies that recall Robert Haigh in his Sema guise, John Cage’s ‘In a landscape’ and Duke Ellington’s blurred chromatic solo piano performances. Mashu leaves nowhere to hide, his playing is poised and cooly controlled, focusing on the beauty of simplicity and purity. The fidelity plays a part too, these recordings are clearly diaristic, caught close up, granular and beautifully blown out in places, adding a level of cohesion to a genuinely special suite of music that melts so effortlessly into the everyday.
Seriously, this one is a keeper, an unsettled but refreshing nap in the afternoon of your life. (Mint / New - with free DL (digital only version available too) - shops please ask for wholesale).
* Mastered By Miles Whittaker
Tracklist
A1 *
A2 May 20 IV
A3 May 20 V
A4 May 20 III
A5 May 20 II
A6 May 20 I
A7 June 33 II
A8 June 33 V
B1 Jan 17 III
B2 Jan 17 II
B3 Jan 17 I
B4 May 20 VI
B5 October 10 I
B6 October 10 II
B7 Scene 22
