Hiroshi

“If There’s Any Tinge of This World” is the Japanese sound artist Hiroshi Ebina’s farewell letter to the winter. While it explores hypnotic, slowly-evolving sound from acoustic and electric instruments, an undercurrent of the album is about the looming uncertainly of our modern society. 

Hiroshi’s original idea was to make an album on quietude and simplicity of the season, which often inspires him to create music. However, the winter of 2019, when he started working on this album, Japan was having unusually warm weather, which reminded him of not just this winter but several recent winters not being the same as it used to be. Year by year, the winter is getting milder and shorter. We see frost much later than we used to, and the amount of snow is getting smaller. In the middle of the recording process, therefore, Hiroshi decided to change the theme for his new album to the disappearing winter due to global warming. 

The album title, just as the titles for each song, has a double entendre. On the one hand, it implies snow hiding all colors on the ground and turning everything gray. On the other hand, it’s a quiet criticism against the flamboyant aspect our society, which is all about vanity and senselessness. The idea became even more obvious when the world started dealing with the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, which made us realize there’s a limit to the capitalist idea of endless development. The album’s overall tone is calm, and the sound of carefully layered instruments are somehow hypnotic. However, the album is meant to be an antidote for the bizarre future the humanity is stepping into. The world full of colors is getting lackluster, and disappearance of the good-old winter is getting more and more obvious. 

The 10 songs in this album symbolically depict slow transitions of the season. Starting with a still warm day (“Warmth”), we first experience “Early Frost.” Then it moves on to “Snowless” day, followed by “Upas,” which means snow in the language of Ainu, the native tribe used to rule over the northern part of Japan. Then we see a series of songs depicting wintery weather, followed by heavy snow causing “Whiteout.” The album ends with “You’re just my memory,” in which listeners are looking back the long gone winter. 

When it comes to actual recording processes, Hiroshi often prefers to limit his choice of instruments, rather than working with all instruments available to him. He launched his project by recording guitar loops into the eurorack sampler and sending it to the open-reel tape deck Nagra, which he used as a tape echo machine throughout this album. Hiroshi often uses very aged tape to achieve the fragile and dry sound quality, which he thinks the best represents the wintry weather of the place he currently lives. Hiroshi also uses a low-pass filter on the guitar loops to make them sound closer to electric pianos. Throughout the album listeners will hear subtle noises in the background, which is actually the sound from the tape machine itself. Additional sound sources include kalimba, glockenspiel, a digital synthesizer and few other eurorack modules. 

Music by Hiroshi Ebina.
Mastered by Joseph Branciforte (http://josephbranciforte.com/home.html).  Cover photo by Hiroshi Ebina