Yuichiro Fujimoto, The Mountain Record (Ahornfelder)

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A little record at just over half an hour, Yuichiro Fujimoto would seem to be taking us on a hike up along some ordinary little mountainside to enjoy the more everyday delights of the great outdoors rather than have us feast on nature´s more ostentatiously spectacular alps. This is the mood conveyed by the music and by the booklet of snapshots accompanying it: Some toddlers attempting to fly a kite, a dog coming down the trail, treetops, a dog and a cat coming down the trail. Life´s small fleeting moments, to be captured and treasured for what they are.

Although crafted into nine miniscule and unpretentious tracks, The Mountain Album still took two years to complete, which is evident in the meticulousness with which Fujimoto handles very small sounds and snippets recorded in the field. Very few "real" instruments are involved other than guitar, harmonica, a glockenspiel and/or toy piano and/or toy xylophone and some electronics. Slowly rendered music which is very warm, right down to the disregard for tape hiss here and there, which I interpret as another nod to the fact that it is a human hand which has created this soundworld, regardless of how many electrical devices were used. In order not to mislead the reader, however, it must be mentioned that while the overall mood of the record is quite bucolic, Fujimoto occasionally feeds a little dissonance into the performance, an angular theme which either cannot or will not resolve itself, or the occasional jarring cut.

Also available on Ahornfelder (a label which put a premium on field recordings) is Près de la Lisiére ("Close to the Border") by Sinebag, another album that judiciously mixes field recordings with meandering acoustic and electronic interludes. And the "music" does indeed seem to be what comprises the interludes; Sinebag asks us to spend a longer time appreicating the sound of the world around us, and despite being divided up into sixteen separate track titles, its forty-two minutes play as one continuous thought spun out in an unbroken skein. See the work as a collage where all sounds are created equal and therefore to be treated equally, whether they be birdsong, a pleasant piano melody or the sounds of washing up. Encased in a beautiful eight-sided gatefold digipak.

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