Japan’s long conversation between electronic music and the natural world begins with kankyō ongaku, the environmental music of the early 1980s, when Hiroshi Yoshimura and Satoshi Ashikawa composed quiet, patient pieces meant to share a room with daylight, drafts and distant weather. Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards and Green and Ashikawa’s Still Way taught a generation of listeners that a synthesizer could hold the stillness of a garden or the slow drift of light across a floor. Haruomi Hosono carried the same spirit into Watering a Flower, music made to sit inside a shop or a home and let the hours pass. Their example runs through nearly everything that followed.
The decades since have kept that door open. Susumu Yokota filled Sakura and Grinning Cat with drifting, blossom-scented calm. Ryuichi Sakamoto carried field recordings into the heart of Out of Noise and async, gathering rain, ice and found sounds from far places and setting them among his harmonies. Chihei Hatakeyama has spent years shaping guitar and synthesizer into misted hillsides and long horizons, and Nobukazu Takemura has brought a bright, playful curiosity to the same territory. Wind, rain, water and birdsong are old companions in Japanese electronic music, and Nekomachi belongs among these names.
When the Las Vegas label Mystery Circles released kopopo… on 22 September 2026, it gave us a truly notable addition to those great Ambient Japanese records of the past. Tides run through kopopo… from the first minute to the last. The modulated white noise that opens “birdcore” swells like surf over a bright shore, and the title piece later drops you into an aquarium of bubbling synthesizers where tiny multicoloured fish tickle your toes. Slow bass tones in “keep calm” echo down a deep well of delayed reverb with streams bubbling somewhere above them, and even the shortest piece on the record, “pool (shallow)”, lets its chimes ring out over clear, sunlit water.
Air and birds fill the spaces in between. That same opening noise flaps and rustles like wings crossing a wide sky, and crystalline plinks gather into a dense, warm melody beneath it until sunlight seems to fall on every note. Birdsong sings over the soft pads of “sand seaside” while a string melody circles round and back into itself, and for those minutes the world feels settled and kind, as if everything is going to be fine no matter what. Birds return near the end, scattered sparsely through a closing arpeggio that rises and falls beneath a passing storm, its notes reverberating long after they have sounded. The rain fades in first, then the clouds part.
People appear on this album too, always at a distance. Faint laughter, the odd footstep and reverb-soaked conversations glow inside “dry morning”, woven in with a deft hand beneath wistful pads and a twinkling melody that recalls raindrops falling on a child’s piano. Spoken Japanese drifts over a fading choir in “good vibes rendezvous”, then settles into the meditative pulse of an electronic hand drum as the synthesizers thicken toward something hymnal. Nekomachi lets voices settle into the landscape like weather, part of the same warm air as the birds and the sea.
Two moments break the calm, and both are handled with real skill. A dissonant chord opens “it’s a good trip like a dream” and rings on beneath a slow, dreamy electric piano melody, with some tones sharp enough to feel like waking from sleep. Drums arrive halfway through for the first and only time on the record, a plain kick and snare under a falling melody, and warmth and harshness settle into balance. Then “pukapuka puzzle” tumbles in, a halting collision of 8-bit error tones that sounds like a room of broken vintage arcade cabinets. It runs two minutes and sends you straight back to the start.
By the end, the record has passed through a full day of weather and light, from sunlit wingbeats to a rain-washed glow, gold and dripping like a forest after a storm. Water, birds, sea air and human voices are folded into the synthesizers so naturally that the seams disappear. Nekomachi has made a generous, inhabited album that sits comfortably beside the Japanese ambient works that shaped it.
kopopo… by Nekomachi was released 22 September 2026 by Mystery Circles
