maya ongaku have shared You are Silence, the new single from their album Nothing Space Music, out August 7th via Guruguru Brain. It follows lead single Astral Echoes. The Japanese trio have also announced UK and European tour dates running through September and October (dates below).
You are Silence came out of Japan’s midsummer Obon season, when the spirits of the dead are believed to return home for a few days. “While writing this song, I imagined what it would feel like to watch over someone I love if I were one of those spirits,” the band said. “It’s a love song, told from the perspective of the dead.”
Nothing Space Music was written after a long stretch of international touring. As audiences got bigger and the shows got louder, the band — Tsutomu Sonoda, Ryota Takano and Shoei Ikeda — found themselves pulled towards the quiet underneath the noise. That pull became the album’s organising idea: “Nothing Space,” which they describe not as emptiness but as a field where boundaries dissolve, between sound and silence, sky and sea, self and world.
They built the room to record it in. Near a seaside shrine in their hometown, in the towns surrounding Enoshima where the band formed, the trio spent months converting a large soundproof building into Nothing Space Studio. They recorded, performed, mixed and designed the album there alone. Nobody outside the three of them heard a note until it was finished.
Tour dates:
Sept 9 — UK, Todmorden, Golden Lion
Sept 10 — UK, Manchester, YES Basement
Sept 11 — UK, London, MOTH Club
Sept 12 — BE, Leffinge, Leffingeleuren Festival
Sept 15 — NL, Nijmegen, Doornroosje
Sept 16 — DE, Munich, Import Export
Sept 17 — CH, Fribourg, Nouveau Monde
Sept 18 — AT, Dornbirn, Kulturcafé Schlachthaus
Sept 19 — DE, Bad Kötzting, Altes Spital
Sept 21 — DE, Leipzig, Backstein West
Sept 23 — DE, Berlin, Gretchen
Sept 24 — DE, Hamburg, Hafenklang
Sept 25 — DE, Cologne, Eigelstein Torburg
Sept 27 — DE, Stuttgart, Merlin
Sept 29 — ES, Valencia, 16 Toneladas
Sept 30 — ES, Madrid, Moby Dick
Oct 1 — ES, Barcelona, Upload
Oct 2 — ES, San Sebastián, Dabadaba
Oct 5 — PT, Porto, Lovers & Lollypops
Oct 6 — PT, Lisbon, ZDB
Pre-order “Nothing Space Music”, out August 7th via Guruguru Brain
Pre-order: https://gurugurubrain.space/collections/releases
Bandcamp: https://mayaongakuggb.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-space-music