’80s Japanese ambient, Y La Bamba’s expansive Chicana indie pop lead this week’s music recs

By The A.V. Club, Randall Colburn, Danette Chavez, Ann-Derrick Gaillot | February 15, 2019 | 5:30pm

Music Features Asides

’80s Japanese ambient, Y La Bamba’s expansive Chicana indie pop lead this week’s music recs

Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990

[Light In The Attic, February 15]

It’s not often that one can credit capitalism with a creative renaissance, but such was the case in Japan in the 1980s, when a financial boom led those in power to invest in art and music. A slew of artists, including Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Studio Ghibli’s Joe Hisaishi, were given oodles of cash to create immersive soundscapes designed to amplify the consumer experience. With Kankyō Ongaku, a new compilation from Light In The Attic, the ambient and incidental music that was born of this era has been licensed and packaged together for the first time outside of Japan. It’s beautiful stuff, too, ranging from spritely and playful to stately and atmospheric. Yoichiro Yoshikawa’s “Nube,” for example, is all texture, pairing starry synth swells with a hoarse, persistent rumble. The rhythmic buoyancy of Yoshiaki Ochi’s “Ear Dreamin’” and the crystalline chimes of Toshifumi Hinata’s “Chaconne,” meanwhile, would sound right at home underscoring the dungeons of any JRPG. Even as the songs drift between moody, Eno-inspired ambience, sparkling mischievousness, and pastoral wonder, they remain reliably soothing and always transportive. [Randall Colburn]

Andrew Bird, “Sisyphus”

[Loma Vista, January 30]

That sound you hear is my ineffective whistling, brought on as ever by the release of a new Andrew Bird song. “Sisyphus,” off the cheekily titled My Finest Work Yet, due out March 22, features as big a sound as any Bird has ever produced, cymbals and tom-toms cresting before the first line is delivered. The beguiling new track reworks the Greek myth, restoring some agency to the condemned Greek king; having pushed the boulder to the top of the hill, he decides to “Let it roll / Let it crash down low.” His echoing vocals are almost cavernous—expansive, so as to hold our collective anger and optimism. Bird has called My Finest Work Yet his most overtly political album, but it doesn’t sound like we’re in for some erudite takedowns of neo-Nazis: In an interview with KCRW’s Madeleine Brand, he said he’s mostly looking to start a conversation, one that presumably includes a lot of (regular) whistling. [Danette Chavez]