Yoshimi - Tokyo Restricted Area (2016)

In 2015, Saiba ’98 brought to our attention Yoshimi Hishida, a Tokyo-born musician who has worked in the music industry in Japan for over two decades now and has a rich history of work in musical scoring for Japanese cinema. On Saiba’s strong recommendation, we checked Yoshimi out and immediately got in touch about him producing an album for us, as the work he had created in recent years was perfect for our vision for “dream music”. Luckily, Saiba had already been pushing Dream Catalogue towards Yoshimi and he was impressed with our approach to “dream music”, and while his own music stylistically comes from a darker and a somewhat different place than many Dream Catalogue artists, that same approach to delivering a dream-like narrative and heavy concept through music and presentation was right in line with Yoshimi's own musical vision.

After our discussions with Yoshimi, he set about working for months on ‘Tokyo Restricted Area’, a deeply inspired album which reflects a more ominous light upon his home city of Tokyo – a story that those who do not hail from there may be unaware of. It is based on a style he has pioneered called “Japanese Hell Trap”, and in a sense its concept is very hardvapour – reflecting upon the esoteric aspects of life that most do not want to explore. At times a very dark listen, the artist’s use of traditional Japanese musical sounds, cinematic effects and futuristic trap-style bass kicks and percussion blend together to create a wholly original atmosphere.

This album is about the city of Tokyo and the ghosts and ancient lore that exist beneath the cracks of the concrete metropolis, the ancient history that paved the way for modern civilisation. It is a very spiritual album, and this is reflected in the music with its sparse organic tones that make the listener reflect, its cyberpunk-like futurism brought out in the hard electronics.