Music Discovery of the Day: Magical Sounds Rising from the Shores of Enoshima – “Nothing Space Music” from maya ongaku

In moments when we wish to slip away from the daily rush and anchor our minds in a calm, misty, and timeless harbor, a wonderful discovery comes to our rescue. Sprouting from Enoshima, a coastal town located about 50 kilometers south of Tokyo, the Japanese ambient-psychedelic trio maya ongaku takes listeners on a journey beyond mental boundaries with their fresh album, Nothing Space Music.

Representing the new wave of Japanese psychedelic music under the Guruguru Brain label alongside names like Takuro Okada, the group derives its name from the Sanskrit word “maya” (the world beyond direct perception, the image outside the frame) combined with the noise collective Group Ongaku. After returning to their town following an international tour last summer and fully renovating an old building to establish their own Nothing Space Studio, the trio brings that very studio intimacy and wooden texture to our ears in this new album.

An Evolving Sound Palette: From Acoustic to Analog Dreams

The band’s debut album, Approach to Anima, stood on an acoustic, organic line with Shoei Ikeda’s earthy saxophone, Tsutomu Sonoda’s guitar, and Ryota Takano’s basslines. The subsequent Electronic Phantoms EP shifted towards a more danceable electronic track with Moog synthesizers and Roland TR-8S rhythm machines.

The new album, Nothing Space Music, stands in a tremendous balance right in the middle of these two universes. This time, the group has condensed the open-ended and spreading improvisational structures of their previous works into much tighter, almost bite-sized “pop morsels”; yet these tracks continue to open up to boundless mental universes as you listen.

The Art of Saying Much with Little

The most fundamental element defining the band throughout the album is that light, velvety atmosphere created by avoiding harsh and loud frequencies. When Tsutomu Sonoda’s 80s-textured Juno-6 synthesizer, the sounds of a water bowl instrument (waterphone) crafted by sculptor Seiji Iida, and neutral wooden percussions combine, a highly layered soundscape emerges that belongs to no single geography on Earth.

“Hisoku Blue”: Slowly draws the listener in with the subtle polymetric overlap of synthetic layers in the background.

“Flowing”: The melody rising from Shoei Ikeda’s Rhodes piano almost tips its hat to Erik Satie’s famous Gymnopédie No. 1, before making way for Sonoda’s soft, double-layered vocals.

A Magical Listening Experience

Nothing Space Music is fresh proof of the skill to “say much with little.” Never rushing its tempo and intricately crafting the spaces between rhythms, this album is tailor-made for putting on your headphones and disconnecting from the world during a coffee break or the quiet hours of the evening.