Rain pours down into the ocean. No one is there to see it. A few hours later, it happens again. Without an observer, those few hours contained infinity.
Hakobune has soundtracked your [a] reveries, [b] your hushed moments alone in the yard, [c] your retreats into the headphone dream space between your temples, with over forty physical releases since 2007. Takahiro Yorifuji shatters the “prolificacy” vs. “quality control” argument by blurring the boundaries where one release ends and another begins, as each luminescent reverb haze drifts alongside its antecedents into a catalog documenting one overarching idea’s endless cycle of reincarnation. The pleasure is ours. I put on Hakobune at home and I smile. I close my eyes. If no one else is home, I turn up the volume as high as I can bear. If I’m cooking dinner and I turn on the stove fan, sometimes its drone joins the music in consonance.
After last year’s split tape with ambient underground mainstay M. Sage, Hakobune returns to Sage’s Patient Sounds label for Seamless and Here, his first widely available vinyl release, second only to 2012’s hyper-limited holy grail Recalling My Insubstantial Thoughts. Focus your mind on album opener “Hidden Away” to spend thirteen minutes defying the notion of consciousness. The distinction between “lead” and “backdrop,” or “drone” and “melody,” fades into mist as Hakobune’s hi-fi delay trails, sacred chordal pads, and resonant bass note swells meld into a cloud cover for the solitary six-string twinklings a few layers back. Any extracted segment of the session contains the harmonic and emotional seeds of the whole, just as any individual Hakobune release embodies the spirit of his catalog. But to segment this music is to miss the point. Zoom out, behold its entire scope, and enter its atmosphere for the long term.
Seamless and Here is available to preorder in five vinyl colors constituting 500 copies in total.
• Hakobune: http://hakobune.bandcamp.com
• Patient Sounds: http://www.patient-sounds.com
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