Japanese composer, vibraphonist, and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita has announced his new album, Migratory on Erased Tapes (September 6th). Over the past few years, Fujita’s life has involved a very personal migration in the pursuit of a dream to live and compose music amid nature. In 2020, after 13 years of living in Berlin, he returned to his native Japan with his wife and their three children. They now live in the mountain hills along the coast of Kami-cho, Hyōgo, three hours west of Kyoto…an area described as Japan’s hidden paradise. Once settled, he transformed an old kindergarten into his own music studio, Kebi Bird Studio.
Erased Tapes shares how, on his new album, the composer and producer masterfully reimagines and mesmerises with his trademark vibraphone sounds and resumes his experimentation with the marimba and synthesisers that he first incorporated on his 2021 album, Bird Ambience.
While Fujita has an evident appreciation of the natural world and the changing seasons, there is also an appreciation of taking time to enjoy it all, to stop and turn away from those everyday distractions. Fujita’s first single, Tower of Cloud, puts that into practice, encouraging us to look skyward for those oft-missed aerial wonders.
Fujita shares:
“‘Tower of Cloud’ took form when I was preparing a live-set for a tour few years ago, and it evolved as I played in Europe and Thailand. The synth riff gives me a late summer feel and reminds me of cumulonimbus cloud, and I can see a swallow drawing a circle in the sky in the marimba melody.”
On Migratory guests include Moor Mother (Our Mother’s Lights), Hatis Noit (Higurashi) and Swedish shō player Mattias Hållsten, who plays on three tracks.
The album’s title, Migratory, originates from an image that came to him of migratory birds travelling somewhere between Africa, Southeast Asia and Japan, imagining them hearing the music from the land underneath and how their point of view of the world from above blurs the boundaries of music and land.
Expanding on this, Fujita says: “these ideas and images were inspired by my experiences of living abroad and returning to my homeland, as well as by the artists featured on this album who also somehow travelled or lived in other countries across the boundaries, and being influenced by the music of other lands but at the same time somehow led to their roots”.
Pre-Order Migratory: https://idol-io.ffm.to/Migratory