Midweek Music Review - Akira Kosemura: Polaroid Piano

Note: This week, instead of a the normal blog post, I'm reintroducing the Midweek Music Review. We'll be starting with a little known 2009 album from Japanese pianist Akira Kosemura.

Akira Kosemura
Polaroid Piano
Someone Good

Rating: 8.5/10

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"I drove around for hours / I drove around for days / I drove around for months and years and never went no place," Isaac Brock sings on the Modest Mouse tune "Interstate 8" from their 1999 b-sides and rarities compilation Building Nothing Out of Something. It's a track about driving around on "a road shaped like a figure eight," and while songs dealing with the concept of infinity can be heavy and too philosophical for their own good, by putting it in a universal setting, Brock communicated the sentiment universally. Placing the idea of infinity on the road also opened up an idea of choice in regards to it. If you're on a figure eight road, you can travel along it "for months and years" or, presumably, you can turn off on another road.

Polaroid Piano from Tokyo musician Akira Kosemura can be listened to either way. Kosemura has been perfecting his craft for the past four years, and also established his own label, Schole, to release plaintive ambient works that reflect his own aesthetic. On Polaroid, each of the ten tracks on the pianist's 2009 release for Australian label Someone Good is like a self-contained figure eight. Their beautiful melodies seldom last more than three minutes, but the circular nature of those melodies feel as if they could go on, entrancingly, forever. Putting some of these shorter tracks on a loop loses none of their haunting vibrancy. Like Brock's Interstate, you can travel along these tracks forever or you can travel peacefully from road to road. Polaroid Piano is repetition as meditation, with its elegant piano breathing light and life into its surroundings.

Individual songs don't mean so much on Polaroid. Listening to any one track is analogous to listening to any other, with the piano rolling peacefully along and forming the backbone of each of these songs. Opener "Higari" adds dollops of xylophone and "Guitar" adds, um, guitar and other instruments crop up here and there in an appropriately subtle fashion, but the album's titular instrument is the disc's driving melodic force.

Solo piano pieces, especially ones that span a total of 25 minutes, could certainly come off as boring, and if it was just the instruments that existed in Kosemura's space on Polaroid, these same melodies would probably come off as sterile and unengaging. Thankfully, there's an entire narrative just in the background of the songs on Polaroid. The production is remarkably open, as if the album was recorded on a picturesque back porch somewhere. You can hear the creaks in the wooden bench as Kosemura shifts his weight, the fingers glancing over the steel strings of the occasional acoustic guitar, the groan as each pressed piano key rubs uncomfortably against the adjacent two, the depression of each individual foot pedal. Other ambient noises-- morning birds and school children-- sound on paper like obvious companions, but do a lot to add to the natural, homespun feel. Even when looped and reversed guitar noises show up on "Sign" it still sounds completely organic.

Each piece here acts, appropriately, like a soundtrack to a photograph. The aforementioned "Sign" looks out a rural cabin's window of condensation into the new spring. "Tyme" watches dawn light capture dust from ascending attic stairs. Closer "Venice" captures the skyline of the titular city from a distant body of water. "Would" creeps around the corner of an overlarge Victorian-styled living room. The lived-in quality of each song paints each of these pictures in a nostalgic, wonderfully sentimental light. Some photographs have a quality to them that gives pause, and can make it seem okay to stare at them forever. Kosemura's snapshots on Polaroid Piano, like Brock's Interstate 8, can loop around ad infinitum, or can jump from picture to picture. Either way, it's difficult to want to leave.