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CD Feature/ Yuichiro Fujimoto: "The Mountain Record"

  Tobias

The more I read and think about it and the more I listen, the more a simple conclusion seems to manifest itself in my mind: We need to become children again to be able to perceive the world around us as what it really is – music. Yuichiro Fujimoto is one of those artists whose entire oeuvre seems to teach us this very lesson and “The Mountain Record” is his latest aural excursion into a blank world, unspoilt by expectations and terminologies.

One short glimpse at Yuichiros wonderful homepage already points us in the right direction: A bird flies from one corner of the site to the other, flapping its wings in sheer joy and a naively drawn boy smilingly waves his hand. When the doors of perceptions are cleansed, a positive soul will see the world as a babbling baby, as yet unaware of danger or distraction. For this album, Fujimoto seems to have made quite a few hikes with his tape recorder under his arm and extended his microphones into the scenes of daily life he encountered. He has found voices of men and animals, the rustling of the wind in the leaves, feet moving over gravel paths, something being wound up, indistinct noises of the city, wooden parts touching each other and cars driving in the distance. At times, you can hear the tape recorder being switched off and occasionaly there is a fair amount of hissing, but these only add to the intimacy of the tracks and their laid-back nature. Obviously, field recordings play an important part on “The Mountain Record”, but they are never the sole goal of the compositions. Instead, gently picked acoustic guitars, a spaceous piano, carefree humming, solitary glockenspiel-tones and a duet between a toy piano and a harmonica mingle with the sounds of the sourroundings, forming brittle poems – like waking up late on a Sunday morning to the rays of the sun, with the window wide open. The overall mood is one of happiness and wonder, except for two more experimental pieces, which continue the themes mentioned previously, but take them to an unreal level: The nine minute long “To make a fire in that old store”contrasts glitchy micro sounds with two endlessly repeated guitar chords and “Fruit Shapes” juxtaposes roughly cut samples of various instruments to the background of an ondulating drone.

You can use the CD as relaxed wallpaper or dive deep into its athmosphere, loosing yourself as you let go. From whatever point of view you approach “The Mountain Record”, it never seems to “want” or “demand” anything. It gives you every chance to find the inner child again and listen with open ears – and perceive the world around us with a fresh mind.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Yuichiro Fujimoto
Homepage: Ahornfelder Records