TATSURO MURAKAMI - An Imaginary Autumn (2023)

Tatsuro Murakami is an artist originally from Tokyo, Japan, who spent several years Brazil before returning home, to rural Japan. After emerging from his earlier work as part of a progressive rock band, Tatsuro began to make Ambient and Experimental music. In the year that he graduated from a conservatory in São Paulo, he released his debut album on La Petite Chambre, a label from Belo Horizonte in Brazil. A few years later ‘The Sound of Living Things’ followed, on Italian imprint ROHS! Records. He has also headlined with many well-known compatriots including Shuta Yasukochi, Rhucle, Ken Ikeda and Ayami Suzuki.

Tatsuro’s work draws inspiration from places and feelings, whether this be photography, film or personal accounts and experiences. Living in Latin America and recollecting his time in rural Japan, nature has become a fixation for this artist, bleeding into the concepts of his work. A wide and varied taste covering styles such as Brazilian Choro music, Ambient and Jazz combined with his studies and performances as part of bands such as Stone Music, has led to a beautiful combination of sounds and textures in his solo work.

‘An Imaginary Autumn’ is a set of seven reflections, transcribing the eight years’ worth of Japanese Autumns that Tatsuro was not able to experience, due to personal circumstances. He aimed to create something as beautiful as the autumn leaves in Japan, which he was unable to see for himself. He stepped outside one December, only to be greeted by the cold winter wind as Autumn had already disappeared.

Tracks range in mood and composition, with opening piece ‘Slow Dance’ reflecting chord progressions that you might hear in Choro or Jazz music. ‘Liquefied Surface’ decodes the randomised melodies of a small modular synth kit before ‘In Her Absence’ warps electric guitar and bass into unrecognisable instrument sounds. Centrepiece ‘Misplaced Dream’ takes a solo guitar motif recorded to cassette tape, adorned by further iterations of minimal guitar sounds and happenstance tape-processing errors. The absorbing ‘Swimming in the Dark’ and its satisfying hiss follows, using a recording from a dark and rainy day in Tokyo. ‘Dialogue with a Mountain’ haunts, as Tatsuro’s first toy keyboard is turned into a droning soundscape, fed through some effects pedals. Closing piece ‘Rising of Something Brilliant’ places an electric guitar loop alongside some classical guitar chords, with cascading echoes of subtle overdrives and faded riffs ebbing into a melancholy bliss.

‘An Imaginary Autumn’ is the second album to utilise our new record wallet style format, with artwork provided by Tatsuro’s long-time collaborator Anais-karenin. The photography here perfectly depicts the idyllic Japanese autumns that Tatsuro had been starved of for so long, until finally he was reunited in 2021.