Bleep

It has taken almost forty years for Hiroshi Yoshimura’s final album to circulate around the world. After experiencing a resurgence of interest thanks to changing algorithms, Youtube deep dives, and generous reissues, Hiroshi Yoshimura has been rightfully regarded as a pioneer of environmental music, steering the burgeoning kankyō ongaku scene in late 70s and 80s Japan. With this heightened acclaim, the puzzle pieces of a discography characterised by rarities fetching hefty prices are finally being put back together; Temporal Drift continues to rejuvenate his work with a long awaited reissue of Flora.

Originally created in 1987, Flora was intended to follow Yoshimura’s landmark 1986 albums Green and Surround, though shelved until a quiet release in 2006 three years after his passing on PREM Promotion, a Japanese “music for healing” label. Where previous albums were created for static, in situ listening, designed to merge with and enhance the spaces of museums, fashion shows, and the home, Flora showed an artist beginning to think about motion: not to simply be surrounded by sound but to move through it.

Inspired by walks in the park near his Tokyo home, Flora possesses a previously unexplored agility, expressed in the gentle magic of arpeggios drifting lazily along streams and idyllic harp plucks guiding mystical synth choirs. Synth and piano trade places on ‘Over The Clover’ in a curiously joyous, fluttering melody, tiptoeing and evolving alongside each other as pianos traipse further into the album around wisps and bubbles of electronics. Amidst more plaintive or reflective tracks, the beachfront serenity of ‘Adelaide’ and the plucky keys carrying weight on ‘Silence’, ‘Maple Syrup Factory’ is as sweet and sugary as one would expect, with synth timbres containing a heartwarming simplicity.

Flora is reissued at a time where the concept of environmental music isn’t so niche anymore: everyone is accustomed to listening to music on the go, switching songs and sceneries simultaneously, and can access Hiroshi Yoshimura’s bountiful worlds wherever we please.