I offer humble thanks to Takahiro Yorifuji for continuing to enrich our lives with his whispered ambient guitar work. The catalog he has created under the Hakobune moniker gathers limited cassette and CD releases by the month, like motes of dust and ash carried by the wind to their resting place in some untouched corner of the forest floor. 2014 saw the release of Seamless and Here, his first widely available LP, via Patient Sounds — accompanied by the release of pleasant sighs and the occasional rogue tear from our faces as we let his washes of reverb unfurl across our living rooms.
Hakobune has refined the process by which he improvises/composes/performs his music to such a fine point that each successive release can barely be distinguished from its predecessors to the naked ear. But to make such distinctions between his sessions is to miss the point of his work. Like La Monte Young’s notion of one primordial composition of infinite duration into which musicians tap for short stretches when they perform, the individual entries of the Hakobune catalog unite on a grand scale into one network of complementary moments captured in time.
A new Hakobune cassette entitled Love Knows Where arrives on July 11 via longtime supporters Constellation Tatsu. Our first listen to the tape, “curtains far seen,” compresses his typically expansive song structures into one nice little morsel of holy drone bliss. Trace the swells and rarefactions of his layered guitar performance, whose audibly plucked notes occupy only a small fraction of the spread. The rest is pure vapor, stretched and smoothed into sheets of shimmering texture that bear only vestiges of discernible six-string input.
• Hakobune: http://hakobunemusic.jp
• Constellation Tatsu: http://www.ctatsu.com
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