Miyazaki plays simple, elegant, actually more optimistic than sorrowful melodies on guitar, piano and sitar, gorgeously perched atop shoreline field recordings captured, looped and layered by Kobayash.
[Release page] Masayoshi Miyazaki says I’m Living with Melancholy in the Fog is “a sad album…written on the abyss of despair.” Together with Hiroshi Kobayash, he needed to digest the horror of the Fukushima tsunami which hit Japan in 2011. Miyazaki plays simple, elegant, actually more optimistic than sorrowful melodies on guitar, piano and sitar, gorgeously perched atop shoreline field recordings captured, looped and layered by Kobayash. Although no doubt eked out under great emotional stress, although they are indeed signs of faltering under the weight of the devastation, the ultimate impression is of the indomitability of the human spirit.
The first two tracks are reminiscent of an old-time, upright piano player accompanying a light-hearted silent film and a trill tickled out just above the water line some time later seems to indicate that the birds are back and after them, the drummers and dancers and flag-wavers. The only truly despairing and seemingly “lost” impression is made by the penultimate track, “A Complete Failure,” which may be a kind of panicked and visceral response to the haywiring nuclear power plant. To make some sense, and maybe even something beautiful, out of inexplicable destruction and mourning is an admirable achievement.
I’m Living with Melancholy in the Fog is available on Flaming Pines. [Release page]
