Promotional poster for ‘(No Pussyfooting)’ by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, 1973

Hiroshi Yoshimura’s last official album before his passing. ‘Four Postcards’ is a beautiful and intricate album that sees the artist doing what he does best: creating eerie, detailed and soothing pieces of sound. This project manages to capture the essence of the time it was released, with the many soundscapes that the synths create sounding like ringtones and notification sounds from the early 2000s technological landscape, and still managing to make it work into the hauntingly alluring minimalistic music that had been the standard of his career up until that point.

RIP

Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura, c. 1980

we should have a more conscious attitude toward the sounds – other than music —that we listen to. presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man's capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart. background music, which is supposed to create 'atmosphere', is far too excessive. in our present condition, we find that within certain areas and spaces, aspects of visual design are well attended to, but sound design is completely ignored. it is necessary to treat sound and music with the same level of daily need as we treat architecture, interior design, food, or the air we breathe. in any case, the "wave notation" series has begun. i hope it will be used and judged for what i had in mind as 'sound design', but of course the listener is free to use it in any way. however, i would hope this music does not become a partner in crime to the flood of sounds and music which inundate us at present. from the liner notes of ‘Music for Nine Postcards’

Image 1983-1998, Susumu Yokota

It's a very personal project, representing a very different side to his musical persona to the one you may already be aware of. Five of the tracks were recorded with guitars and organs in 1983-4, the remainder were inspired by those songs and were recorded in 1997-8. There are already another two Skintone albums ready to go, both in very different styles. Yokota is proving increasingly difficult to pin down, which can only be a good thing as far as we're concerned.