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Lullabies for air conditioners: the corporate bliss of Japanese ambient | Musique Non Stop

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Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Lullabies for air conditioners: the corporate bliss of Japanese ambient

Inspired by the technological boom of 1980s Japan, a group of composers created beautiful futurist fantasies – funded by housing developers and lingerie companies

In the late 1970s, while Brian Eno was imagining background melodies for baggage claim on his album Music for Airports, music for inanimate objects was also becoming big business in Japan with Get at the Wave, Takashi Kokubo’s 1987 masterpiece given away with Sanyo air conditioning units, or Yasuaki Shimizu’s selected ambient works for a Seiko watch advert.

Bright, beautiful, unashamedly corporate pieces like these appear on Kankyō Ongaku, a new compilation of Japanese ambient music from 1980 to 1990, when the influence of minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley met a golden era for electronics. Kankyō Ongaku (meaning environmental music) melded music and commerce, and turned lounge music into an art form.

Related: Ambient pioneer Midori Takada: 'Everything on this earth has a sound'

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by Jack Needham via Electronic music | The Guardian

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