OG Japanese beatmaker/producer/composer Fumitake Tamura returns to Leaving Records with Mijin, a highly intentional collection of subtle environmental music & beats - inspired by the natural world and humanism - featuring guest performances from Sam Gendel and Saul Williams.

“... So it is that sound, confronting the silence of ma, yields supremacy in the final expression. (Here I wish the term “expression” to be understood in its most general sense.)”

• Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence, Scarecrow Press, 1995

The title Mijin comes from a Japanese word meaning very fine particles. The album gathers particle-like sounds and lets them resonate in space. As I watch the movements that arise between them a balance gradually takes shape. Within those relationships and the quiet tension between them I explored how silence can resonate with sound.

The album begins with the most minimal piano chords then develops by reconstructing fragments of voice and percussion, Rhodes and synths along with traces of jazz and soul. Each sound exists like a particle drifting in air gently resonating with the others to form the structure.

I hope that the spaces and silences created by this placement will appear with a presence equal to the sounds themselves."
- Fumitake Tamura

Mijin, the new album by Fumitake Tamura, opens with “Interstice”, whose delicately placed staccato piano chords are given reverberous and echotic breathing room to hang and hover in a rarefied air. “I wanted to emphasize the contrast between sound and silence,” Tamura writes. The result is hypnotic and meditative, gently nuanced, and yet ghostly in barely-there flutters of sound.

Lead single “Resonance” features acclaimed hip-hop and spoken word artist Saul Williams, who contributes a meticulously fragmented but characteristically ensnaring low register baritone over Tamura’s insistent and liquid Fender Rhodes chords, developing an arrhythmic pulse as Williams’ voice emerges in moments amidst the oscillations.

“Ostinato” is another key moment. Here featuring the celebrated LA saxophonist / multi-reedist Sam Gendel, the track clatters and bellows as strange and unpredictable relationships between its constituent sounds reveal a secret harmonic foundation on which its scattered melodies are built. “I kept subtracting to see how far I could strip the arrangement,” Tamura says.

Fumitake Tamura has released a number of solo and collaborative albums and EPs on the LA-based Leaving Records, his own Tamura imprint, and distribution through Ryuichi Sakamoto's Commmons platform. He is based in Tokyo.

All tracks Written, Produced, Recorded and Mixed by Fumitake Tamura

Fumitake Tamura – Prophet, Electronics, Sampling
Sam Gendel - Saxophone on Track 2
Saul Williams - Vocals on Track 4

Design by Ayako Fujita