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Kitchen. Label is a record label & publishing house based in Singapore. Despite its domestic-sounding name and penchant for delicate gestures and empty, impassive interiors, Kitchen. Label is a thoroughly metropolitan phenomenon. A bit like the roving eye of the flâneur in Baudelaire, who found solace in the bittersweet juxtapositions of urban life, Kitchen. Label documents momentary flickers of melancholic beauty in unlikely environments. Part of the independent design studio Kitchen. (est. 2005) — Read more
September 28, 2010
AUTUMN OF PIANO
haruka nakamura and Akira Kosemura will each be performing a set respectively at Aoyama 月見ル君想フ.
More information of the event and ticketing at the link below.
- http://www.moonromantic.com/?p=3463
September 15, 2010
Cyclic Defrost (Australia) reviews「twilight」haruka nakamura
Japanese ambient artists have a particular ability to combine an almost twee naivety with a studied approach to arrangement that can result in music of subtly disarming simplicity. It can also collapse into childish whimsy. On his second album Twilight Haruka Nakamura achieves the successes of the former while deftly avoiding the pitfalls of the latter, also examining more complex musical structures. In this he is aided by a variety of collaborators: Araki Shin and Akira Uchida on saxophone, Isao Saito on percussion, Janis Crunch on guitar and vocalist April Lee, intermittently accompanying Nakamura’s piano.
Twilight can generally be described as a soft form of post-rock, lazily ambling instrumentals pitched somewhere between Tortoise’s tamer spin-off groups Brokeback or Directions in Music, and Norwegian jazz trios like In the Country or Tord Gustavson. ‘Yuube no Inori’ unfolds to the buzzing glow of Shin’s gentle saxophone purr, while ‘On The verandah’ seems to have been recorded right there, as insects twitter to Nakamura’s shuffling keys. Both ‘Dialogo’ and ‘Koukei’ dissolve into more formless abstraction, almost new-agey in parts recalling Jon Hassel’s Fourth World recordings, but these explorations remain very much products of Nakamura’s vision, combining to form a convincing sonic portrait of the Twilightphotograph displayed on the album’s cover.
Joshua Meggitt / Cyclic Defrost
- http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/
September 13, 2010
yuzuri x twilight
twilight by haruka nakamura is now available at yuzuri, a boutique art shop located in Saitama Japan.
September 12, 2010
evam eva x twilight
evam eva recommends「twilight」haruka nakamura, now on sale at all evam eva branches in Japan.
Original polaroids from twilight also now on display at the Jiyugaoka store. Thanks Aoyama-san!
“東京在住の音楽家 haruka nakamura さんのCD「 twilight 」を店頭にて扱っています。
海辺のスタジオで録音された、ピアノが紡ぐ静謐なセッション。パッケージにはご本人が撮り下ろしたポラロイド写真もブックされています。
撮影場所は、二子玉川。
普段、目にしている風景も音楽とともに眺めてみるとまた違った表情をします。
この作品は、太陽が地平線にゆっくりと沈む夕暮れ時の光景にささげられた作品です。
消えゆく太陽の光・・・
空の移り変わり・・・
とても丁寧に、とても穏やかな音の風景を
ぜひ、聞いてみて下さい。
今回、特別に自由が丘店では、パッケージに使用されているポラロイド写真のBOOKをご覧いただけます。” – evam eva
- http://evameva.com/promotion/1/blog_index.html
September 6, 2010
A time of transition: Pure tonal paint.
An excellent review of twilight by haruka nakamura from Germany’s Tokafi. Thanks Tobias!
“Most musicians still consider progress an indispensable virtue. And yet, some of the most fundamental things in life are based on routine and repetition: The cycles of birth, life and death, of blossoming beauty and irreversible decay, the seasons, the principles of falling in and out of love with someone. Japanese pianist, producer and improviser Haruka Nakamura has made these the focal points of his music. To Nakamura, there is still plenty of wonder to be found in daily life, surprises lurking even in the most basic propositions. On his first two albums, a seemingly unspectacular word like “grace” delineated a compositional approach of imposing depth, as the mere sight of a garden or the sensation of fine drizzle on his skin were capable of sparking miniature-scale concertos of utmost refinement. For Twilight, he has turned, as a source of inspiration, to the time between day and night, when the delicate rays of the setting sun enter into a harmonious yet strangely ambivalent truce with the impending darkness and the world is caught in a suspenseful moment of great anticipation and infinite calm. It is a time that has come to embody entire philosophies as well as spiritual concepts, but which means nothing more and nothing less than that “we’re moving towards tomorrow” to him: Light gives way to shadow, one day ends and another one commences – that is all there is to make the moment special.
Accordingly, images of tangible tenderness, quietude and stillness, of melancholy and an inexplicable longing grace the pleasantly rough yet extremely delicate pages of the 24-page hardcover-book protecting the CD: An empty bridge drenched in grainy, blue-greenish orange, the sun shining dreamily through the leaves of a sleepy tree, the meditative silence of a bedroom, rose petals strewn across a small stretch of asphalt – just flicking through the pages takes one instantly to a place where attention turns to the inside and long-forgotten memories can suddenly seem real and fresh. If the imagery should seem just as important to Nakamura as the sounds, this is no coincidence, as snapshot-like Polaroids such as the ones collected here hold the potential of triggering sonic cues to him. The slightly blurry tones of the photography congenially capture the emotional ambivalence of the early evening’s plentiful moods, which, in turn, find themselves reflected in the music: Despite its spontaneous air, Twilight foremost breathes minute attention to detail, displaying an astounding ear for orchestration in every single instant.
Following in the footsteps of French impressionists like Monet and Satie, Nakamura is putting together his acoustic paintings dot by dot, capturing the fragile fleetingness and ephemeral intensity of a moment rather than aiming at documentary precision. Colour is everything to him and the post-romantic idea of a Klangfarbenmelodie, of using timbre as a musical tool alongside more conventional elements like harmony or melody, takes on seminal importance. Already in his instrumentational decisions, Nakamura reveals his declared intention of creating a spellbinding sonic palette to match the visual aspects of his vision: Bronze-tinged Tenor- and goldenly glowing Soprano-Saxophones, silvery Flute and pearly drum brushes sketch metaphorical allusions to an early-evening-skyline, on which his Piano-tones dance like little birds flapping their wings in excited anticipation. Even Nakamura’s chords, peacefully resting inside themselves yet imbued with a certain restlessness and inability to resolve, are pure tonal paint, freed from any kind of limiting functionality and goal-oriented direction.
It is therefore most certainly three-and-a-half-minute short “dialogo”, rather than some of the more strikingly melodic passages, which must be considered the album’s most representative cut: The opening seconds consist of nothing but seemingly random Piano-sprinkles, shimmering droplets only faintly attracted to each other by key and thematic glue. Isao Saito’s cymbals come in with a tentative, almost absent-minded sensuality, Araki Shin’s Saxophone leaves a streak of nocturnal red on the canvas and then the solitary notes coalesce into a chain of complex harmonies, each chord clearly delineated from the next and growing without apparent relation to its predecessor, floating by like shapeless clouds, gently, peacefully, from one corner of the horizon to the other, before eventually disappearing from sight.
Even though these pieces have clearly been informed by Jazz and chambermusical ensemble play, a sense of estrangement is equally pervasive. Rupturing the steady flow of short, playful and sweet duo- or trio-constellations are two long pieces around the eight- to nine-minute mark on which the prominent use of immersive electronic textures, field recordings, hazy vocals and an otherworldly pop-sensitivity create a sudden tactile shift: “Faraway” rises slowly from the tranquil patter of rain, its delayed rhodes’ chords propelled by a slick, elegant bass-theme, two Saxophone lines, one fast and associative, the other focused and ambient, enigmatically mysteriously run in sync with each other. The title track, a sultry waltz recorded in collaboration with Aspidistrafly’s April Lee, meanwhile, leans on evocative backwards sounds and the hypnotic repetition of its catchword, creating a powerful maelstrom pulling the listener straight into a vortex of warmth, light and joy. It is in these pieces, too, that the album takes the decisive step from being a pleasant collection of sensitive compositions to a work of greater ambitions and programmatic coherency.
It is telling that Nakamura doesn’t end the album on this high note, but follows it up with two short sketches, closing it out in a quiet fashion. The time of twilight is a time of transition, after all, without a real beginning and end, whose strength lies in its sense of spiritual elevation. In a sense, just like some of the most fundamental things in life, it isn’t even there at all.” – Tobias Fischer / Tokafi (Germany)