Takashi Kokubo - Oasis of the Wind II ~ A Story of Forest and Water ~

Takashi Kokubo - Oasis of the Wind II ~ A Story of Forest and Water ~

1.  Awakening of the Forest

               Crisp crickles and crystal callings, the forest stretches, sighs, and opens its eyes.  Groggy and genki, pure morning light filters through the canopy.  Gentle sun softly encourages microcosms of life by warming the ground.  Total peace, Complete harmony; this is the forest of all being.  From here is derived the gelatinous ambiguous ethereal form of consciousness that wiggles itself unendingly, only perceived by some.  From here, this vegetative portal, new beings transform from death to spirited life and every moment is a divine celebration.

               Flora sways to and fro in dance, water sings in endless harmonies, the air breathes melody.

               Harmonically this song is straight forward.  It’s a vamp between Db major 13 and Gb major 13 for the entire 18 some minutes.  Various melodic themes are subtly introduced, each theme focusing on a specific note grouping.  The following themes I could identify:

               -“Main theme”, the metallic chime sound is C, Db, C, Ab, Eb, Ab, F.

               -Bass theme for Db major is Db, Ab, Bb, Db and then sometimes down to a lower Db.

               -Bass theme for Gb major is lower Gb, higher Gb, Db, Eb, Bb.

               -Oboe sound theme is C, Db, Eb, C, Ab, Bb, over the Gb major chord usually.

               -Marimba theme something like Eb, Db, C, Db, possibly harmonized in 4ths or 5ths.   There’s a lot more happening in this theme than I was able to decipher.

               -Various half step trills either creating a major 7^th or lydian effect.

               In summary, each theme is sensitive to chosen notes, following strictly to either their exact melodic idea or if departing, not adding too many note variations.

              

2.  Memory of Summer

               Suspended in the lilting air, transparent indigo nearly palpable thoughts, dreams, and memories whisper. 

               This track is divided into 3 sections, ABA.  The first section (A Section) is comprised of a bass riff going between G sus or G major type of thing, then after a while to an F major type of thing:

               -G D A D, G D A D, G D C D, G D B D.  

               -F C A E, F C A E, F C G E, F C G E.

               These two chords bop around a while.  What also stands out the most is the synth pad which seems to be playing a descending harmony, starting on high G note, then descending F#, E, and finally D.  I think it’s voiced as follows:

               -B E G, A D F#, G C E, F# A D.  These are all triad shapes happening over top of the G bass.

               After this G and F section, the song takes a break, then returns with the same ideas transposed down a whole step, F and Eb.  As far as I could tell, everything is played the same just shifted down.  This is the 2^nd (B) section.  After a little bit of time here the song goes back home to the A section before winding down.

3.  Distant Blue Star

               In space, surveying the entirety of the universe.  Kaleidoscope of sacred geometry and cosmic entities.              

               The final track lulls us to peace with a I, V, I, IV chord progression in Db major.  Db major, Ab dom 13, Db major, Gb major.  All themes are very ambiguous, but I caught some emphasis on the 13^th scale degree over the Ab7, so that was cool =). 

               There are the echoed marimbas half step trilling, airy almost non-existent synth pads that transcend the 4^th dimension, and various living wind breathes invigorating the atmosphere.

Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto - Vrioon

Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Vrioon

 

 

Look around from outer space, blue globe below.  Zoom, zoom, zoom inwards, pick a country, pick a town, pick a building, pick a person.  

Plunk.  Wake up in bed, early white light consciousness.  Inspect arms, legs, body, get up and go to the mirror.  Unrecognized face looks back, the reflection of another.  Fallen into the body of another person.  White walls, white bed, white blankets.  Pull back curtains, reveal bustle city below, picture cumulous sky above.  Head throbs, no pain, silhouette of the body, Plunk.

Blink, Blink, close to the floor.  Look around, inspect arms, legs, body, fuzzy brown black and cream spotted fur.  Look up, familiar person standing by the window with the curtains pulled.  Waggle out of the room, out of the green door way into the hall way.  Apartment building hall way.  Woman in French work attire and beret opening the door.  Head throbs, no pain, silhouette of the body, Plunk.

Blink, blink.  Look down, see’s curious beagle below.  Gentle pet.  Au revoir to the poochie.   Heads towards elevator.  Notices women’s clothing on self, notices red velvet gloves, feels fancy necklace.  Reflection from sleek silver hardware of elevator wall.  Ding, elevator opens, walks through open spaced marble flooring out to taxi.  Sky threatens to gray.  Gets in taxi.  Pine forest touched with lingerie cigarettes.  Driver effortlessly flows like liquid weaving around traffic.  Reverse sifting from the body being inhabited.  Pulling, stretching, silly putty bubble gum elasticity.  Zoom out, zoom out, zoom outwards.  From person, to building, to town, to country.

Look around from outer space, blue globe below.  Space station throne and large entirely glass building.  Watching all from above. 

Haze, comfortably cloudy semi conscious bliss of pale green butterflies lilting round and round.

Spitter spatter, sky rains while merry go round spins emptily.  Swings in motion with no one on them.  Children’s laughter heard fading away but no one in sight.   Plunk.  All time freezes, all motion halts.  Conscious hopping space being comes from a rip in reality and inspects the play ground.  Poking at the slide, magnifying glass on the swing, scribbling note pad nearly illegible cursive equivalent of alien language.  Space distorts for a moment, all things glitch and lose focus.  Time stop nearly back to normal.  

Explore the back end of the playground, enticing barky thorny vines feel their way forward like an indulgent sin.  Sneak past them, through the portal into darkness.  Caught in a plagued forest.  A wafting smell emanates from further into the woods.  Trip into the mud splash not paying attention, only to the smell.  Shrill yellowed eyes peer from all angles, watching ever the moves you make cautiously through the haunted woods.  Broken scatter-bouts littered here and there.  Terrible evil exists here, but pushing forward to the smell of supple desserts.  Owl hoots from unknown location, comforting is the only normal sound of fauna.  Light fragments darkness, up ahead an exit on a straight forward path.

Step out of the dungeon-esque forest to an opening.  A melancholy, still field presents itself.  Washed colors, masked by a heavy mist.  A heavy feeling of sadness seeps inside every aspect of this field, the trees, the bushes, the water of the pond.  Walk around and explore.  A rock wall in the far back depicts some type of ancient story, a traumatic past associated with the land.  The Forgotten Meadow, unkempt and untouched by time.

A lone fish splashes the pond; a crying echo.  A key floats on the surface, glistens just barely on the un-rusted parts.  The inscription “XII Amu Dahlia” on the key.  Take the key to the rock wall.  It locks in place into one of the pictures, lining up with a calamity from the sky.  A stone to the side moves over slightly, enough space to squeeze behind.  Damp, dank and dark, a mudded pathway leads underground.  The passage way opens up, living quarters of an ancient civilization.  Further down the passage way, a vast, vast opening.  An underground town, forgotten ruins from long ago.  Span the entirety of the buildings..realize a familiarity.  It’s the same city as the beginning.  Panic and shock strike.  Left in silence and awe, witness the underground horizon of the lost city. 

Hiroshi Yoshimura - Green

Hiroshi Yoshimura - Green

1.  Creek

            -Long creek water babbles.  Birds sing.  

|| :  -16^th note low/mid hollow enters,

- followed by pentatonic side synth babbles. 

-Thin synth pad sound swells in the background

-Everything is mostly in the same key until that final chord in the progress.

-Creek fades out.**

-Synth pad takes on more melodic focus during a repeat.

-Synth pad lowers volume, but still present.

-Back to 16^th note low/mid hollow tree trunk, then form repeats    : ||

** Notice how the creek fading out is smack in the middle.

2.  Feel

               -Creek, birds, creek fades out.  Bird stays in.

               -Synth drones major 2^nd?

               -Little movement, subtle quiet synth riff, going 2, root.  Maybe same as synth drone.

               -2 offset rippity fast synth leads on each ear, harmonizing and maybe slightly off tempo with each other.  This theme comes in every so often.

               -New synth chord theme, descending minor 3 notes.  “nya nya!”.

               -Peaks and valleys like a wave (formation).

               -Low synth pad single smooshie chord at the end. 

               -Really high end thin shimmer sparkle.

3.  Sheep

               -Ocean waves

               -Ascending 12 note pattern.  Can be divided as 2 sets of 6, 3 sets of 4, 4 sets of 3, 6 sets of 2, or strangely, 12 sets of 1.  OR 1 set of 12 LOL!

               -Resonating side synths sustaining single notes. 

               -Slightly delayed and panned xylophone.

               -Very almost inaudible phaser synthesizer, fuzzy, drone maybe, in the very very background.

               -The overall chord structure of the song is minimal, very few chords stretched out over large periods of time.

4.  Sleep

               -Crickets

               -High short synth melody, uplifting but lullabalic.

                              -Very beginning melody could be 5, 8, 9.  If in C major, it would be G, C, D.

               -Lower synth plays call and response with above synth.

               -Lots of stray synths playing one or two notes only.

               -At various points all synths coincide together to draw out a V7 chord.  Chord structure is generally ambiguous, whisper drifters.

               -Thematic repeats span across a few instruments.  

               -Two types of Electric keyboards, each hard panned to either side.  These two boards are mid to high and share melodic themes.  Somewhat thin sounding.  They cut through the roaring thick foggy mids of the sustained synthesizers.

5.  Green

               -The sound of rain splashing on to leaves.  The album is called Green.

               -Song is more organized than others.  Clear melodic theme, accompanying bass, left hand.

                              -Main theme is pentatonic.  Melody might be E, G, E, D, E, if in C major.

               -Stray keys/synth notes here and there, panned very far back.

               -Song ends on the major 7^th scale degree!

6.  Feet

               -Subtle very quiet ethereal sustained synth chord..choir sound perhaps?  Right at beginning

               -Hollow windy bass left hand thang comes in.

               -Electric Keys higher octave right hand right panned.

               -Louder organ sound eventually comes in harmonizing more chordal action, still quiet for an organ though.

               -Legend of Legaia, the town with the green house at the top of the village tower.  That is this song.

               -Birds on the form repeat, higher pitched on the left hard pan, more trilly that one is.

                              -Other less active bird on the right.

               -Lots of minor feeling going on, very somber.  Memorial ceremony, funeral?

               -3^rd form repeat, water sounds enter.  Nature takes over with each repeat.  The body goes back to the earth.  The Way of things takes course.  Wailing, mournful choir synthesizer introduces itself.

               -Despite all sadness, ends on (still melancholic feeling but) major chord.  Moving forward after a tragic event.

7.  Street

               -OCEAN WAVES FLOODING THE STREET??

               -Cute keys riff, staccato punctuation here.

               -Pitchy high synth doing it’s thang over top all the water and waves and ocean.

               

 -Again there is a SUPER QUIET, almost not even there, block synth pad chunking away the chords.  Its transparency is due to its quiet volume.  Mostly, the chord is sustained for a few bars, despite the chordal implications from the rest of the instruments.  EX: The synth is playing C major, even if the other instruments make patterns of F major, C major, G major.  That’s not exactly what’s happening here, just a basic example.

               -Hieroglyphs gently pulsate amid the damp rained air of a sleeping rural Japanese town.  Street lights mirror off slick soft roads.  A house light is on, somewhere in the distance.  A stray cat meows.  Then silence.  Peace blankets the town.

8.  Teevee

               -Ocean waves crash again.

               -Keys harmonized riff, mebbe in 4ths?  Like Fort Condor song from Final Fantasy 7.

               -Keys melodic on the right, prolly improvised what have you nots?

               -More low action sustaining synths.

              

 

Shiho Yabuki (矢吹紫帆) - The Body is a Message of the Universe

 

Shiho Yabuki (矢吹紫帆) - The Body is a Message of the Universe

1. Tomoshibi

               A blinking gleams through total darkness.  Opens up the universe, we are born. 

               Waterfalls thrush splash burst forth from darkness and give way to ponds, lakes, oceans, streams.  All water on earth is forming, ebbing tides flow into one another, Yin Yang formations intertwine and creates conditions for life to thrive.

               Fast forward; wild vegetation, deep mist, feral roars, a thick jungle emits fresh yet moist heavy air.  Peer through the face slapping leaves to find ancient stone monuments, angular, Mayan temples with large, long steep steps.  A row of people in brown hoods slowly walk up the steps into the temple.  Clandestine ritual performance.   They chant ominously, but monotone, with low energy.  There is an unsettling feeling.  

2.  Samadhi

               Inside the Temple, a large cauldron being swirled about.  The cauldron shows a ripping image of a Victorian woman on her balcony sighing into the night air.  Melancholy longing, “Where is he?  He’s never late…”  Zoom back out of the cauldron to the temple and ritual.  Missing man is tied up, struggling, a hostage of the cult.  Cult releases him, for they have empathy.  They explain they took him from the future, the time period with the Victorian woman.  They need his knowledge for themselves.  The tribal cult is facing an environmental disaster.  They point to the sky.  Meteor looming over head.

               “How can we prevent this calamity from the sky?” The cult leader asks the man from the future.

               The hostage man stands, slips his arms deeper into his majestic Victorian kingly robed sleeves.  He pulls out magical lines, purples and blues, making pictures in the sky in front of the meteor.  He traces an ancient language, an iridescent incantation against the meteor.

               Little by little, bits of the meteor disappear, as if being erased by a giant cosmic pencil eraser.  The man continues performing his magic.  The sky clears, no more fiery glow of doom overhead.  The tribal cult people all prostrate before the Victorian Magician Man.  After bowing and praying, they begin a feast for their victory and celebrate the hero they stole from the future.  They promise to return him to his time soon.  The night fades away peacefully.

3.  Shiunkai

 

               A detailed look at the banquet for the hero.  Tribesmen giving toasts, raising glasses for the hero.  Very noble, very honorable.

4.  Tenshingoso - Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and Spirit

                The time portal opens for the hero to return to Victorian Era.  Snap, crackle, pop, the sky rips open.  Hero steps inside the wormhole.  Wormhole closes. 

               Back to total blackness, but now the hydrid waterfalls from the beginning spout smaller.  A more tame jungle appears from the void.  A more elegant array of fleurs and more placid wildlife.  Peer through the beauteous yet trimmed leaves, and there’s the woman on her balcony in Victorian time.  The sun is rising.  The man has returned home to his time, to his love, to where he belongs. 

5.  Ki No Nagare - The Way of Energy Flow

 

               Beautiful church music can be heard from the man’s bed.  Sunlight overwhelms the window and unleashes a merciless plunge of healthy morning glow into the room.  Sporadic rainbows throughout the room, reflected from hanging window prisms.

6.  Eikoh - Power and Energy

 

               Man up and about in town.  10 am sun activates the crowds.  Town is alive with optimism, hustle and bustle.  Old timey balloons, genuine clowns, women in large fluffy frilly pastel dresses.  Children playing in the town fountain.  

7.  Tawamure - Cosmic Dance

               Day has finished.  Night time, zoom out, birds eye view of the country.  Various lights are being shut off, watch the map gradually black out.  Simultaneously, stars peep out of the black sky, becoming more visible in lieu of the house lights.  Night bird strides past.  Wisps of wind kiss anyone still outside at this hour. 

               Tiny mystical creatures come out to innocently play.  Faeries, gnomes, invisible night pranksters and other fluttery fun fiends.  They each emanate some kind of sparkle, some kind of glow, some type of bioluminescent trailing in this calm yet cheerful night.  

8.  Karado Wa Uchu No Message - The Body is a Message of the Universe

 

Zoom out of the town, way out.  Zoom out of the earth, Zoom out of the universe.  See it all.  Nebulae, galaxies, all sorts of cosmic beauties.  Credits begin to roll.  Unknown Celestial Choir sings while credits span across the universe in various speeds and formations, changing depending on tempo, rhythms, instrumentation and all that.