Kita Kouhei - Subspecies / 北航平 (neuf) [Ambient]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 60 minutes ago
- 1 min read
*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's January 15th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***
I’ve been following Kita Kouhei for a while now, even though it’s almost a full time job. I took my eye off him for a minute, turned round and it appears he’s dropped about twelve new releases, although in fairness quite a few of them are singles, but still. If you don’t know he’s a Kyoto based sound artist, multi-instrumentalist and percussionist with a fondness for fusing his traditional instruments with gentle machine sounds to create meditative soundtracks for neo-animist ritualism, although it might be worth asking him what he thinks he’s doing.
Subspecies is his sixteenth album and a spiritual successor to his ninth - the low frequency anchored evolutionary sounds of Neospecies. This time round the music is guided by the hidden world of plants, a perfect muse for his ecosystemic approach to composition, where sounds seek balance and mutual benefit rather than domination.
He’s also spread his wings this time round, augmenting his soft edged, already outernational instrumentation, nature celebrating field recordings, ferric hiss and comforting synth pads with the evocative sounds of the cajón, darbuka, tabla and bodhrán amongst others, and it’s everything I hope for in a Kouhei album - gentle, peaceful and borderline blissful electroacoustic soundscapes, well apart from the nu-jazz vibes of “Cruciform and Spiral Flowers“, and the slightly pricklier sounds of, “Blind Life”, but I guess even the best kept ambient gardens have a weed or two.
Playlist Companion
Find Kouhei in the Slow Ambient Playlist.