NRV :: Seasons Beyond the Ashes (See Blue Audio)

Introspective moods are cultivated here with pastoral synth washes and mesmeric floating chords. Yet the wisps of sadness in these short pieces do not linger for too long, as winter has given way to spring rains and new shoots of life emerge out of the soil. Even if that soil has been damaged.

Sounds of glass and gently percolating rhythms

Seasons Beyond the Ashes is an elegant album, that for, all its vibes of relaxation, is layered with a gentle melancholia. Introspective moods are cultivated here with pastoral synth washes and mesmeric floating chords. Yet the wisps of sadness in these short pieces do not linger for too long, as winter has given way to spring rains and new shoots of life emerge out of the soil. Even if that soil has been damaged.

The first song, “Harugasumi (Spring Haze)” is like a blanket of warm fuzz embroidered with elegiac chords. This is music to nestle yourself inside when the world seems harsh. The second piece features clarion calls of detuned brass, and warbling tapes. These memories are ancient even as new growth emerges with the spring rains. Some of the synths on this album were recorded onto old cassette tapes, before NRV (aka Manabu Ito, or Nerve) knew it would even be an album. These give grain and texture as the sounds are refracted and bent when the old tapes were played back and mixed into the resulting songs.

The melancholia has moved into something else on “Painless Morning.” It’s like I am waking up in a crystallized dream. Sounds of glass and gently percolating rhythms make for a new kind of haze as the images from sleep flit back down and the waking world asserts itself, but here with gentleness. As “This Rain Announces the Next Season” features soft tinkling pads and comes out of the speakers in the same way that a calm hush comes over the land when water falls from the sky to wash away the dirt of the world and replenish the well.

The silver nature of reality asserts itself ::

Crickets awaken after the rain on the next track (“Moon Garden”), and birds join in the chorus of nature. These sounds provides the rhythmic elements to this otherwise beatless music. Now the listener is in the Moon Garden when the silver nature of reality asserts itself through the flow of lunar tides. This song could very well be the voice of the moon itself. But the lunar influence isn’t so phantasmagoric and heavy as to turn listeners into lunatics. Things are relaxed than that, the kind of vibe that might be had at a moon viewing party, though here in the vernal months instead of in the fall.

The insects continue their late night serenade on “Sokyokusen.” Ethereal vocals murmur a lullaby evocative of translucent realms. I don’t know if the voice here is vocoded, sampled, or totally synthesized, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t even need to know what is being said. It rings out, echoing poetic.

The pervasive mood of nostalgia on this release that exhales a slight depression may be due to the ashes referenced in the title. The penultimate track is titled “And the First Snow Touches Your Cheek.” But is it snow? On the liner notes for the album it says, “A thread that runs through … is the continuing effects of the earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent nuclear accident, that hit Japan in 2011.” Bursts of fuzz join in a back-and-forth duet with a lonely telephone ring, perhaps a phone line to a past that has disappeared. The last track leaves you wondering winters of the nuclear kind as it asks the question, or is it a statement? “Endless snow… or ashes.”

All in all, if you are a fan of Japanese ambient or New Age works from the 1980s and 1990s you will find much to love here in these pieces. They are an update on that standard template, imbued here with a longing for the way places were, before their change by the ravaging hands of time and fate.

Seasons Beyond the Ashes is available on See Blue Audio. [Bandcamp]