Hakobune & Nobuto Suda

幽霊の庭園 (Garden of Ghosts)

BY Peter EllmanPublished Sep 14, 2016

7
Hakobune and Nobuto Suda both make beautiful ambient drone music on their own (Hakobune has around 50 releases to his name, Suda fewer), and on Garden of Ghosts, they've come together to make another beautiful ambient drone album.
 
Comparisons to Brian Eno are inevitable with this wandering style of ambient music, so although both Hakobune and Nobuto Suda are guitar-based composers, and use way foggier layers of effects in their compositions (almost in a similar vein to shoegaze, but if the guitars were soloed and looped), a lot of Eno's manifesto from Ambient 1: Music for Airports holds up. Garden of Ghosts accommodates many modes of listening without enforcing one in particular; it is as ignorable as it is interesting; it enhances one's listening environment; it produces calm and space to think.
 
Drone is also not a 100% accurate descriptor. Though there are drone-y elements, the warm, enveloping harmonies shift gradually: new notes swell up as old ones decay in infinite reverb, blanketed in looped acoustic guitar notes that lead nowhere. Despite the glacial harmony and meandering melody there's a slight propulsion from the looped guitar notes, almost like gentle waves upon a shore or raindrops on a window pane.
 
If you like this kind of music, you might love this record. It's patient and peaceful; you could fall asleep to it, read, meditate or look out a window, pondering existence.
(Organic Industries)

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