Erik Satie casts a prolonged shadow. The eccentric French composer’s distinct technique to melody and harmony has traveled a long time downstream from his setting up position in the 19th century, imparting lessons not only to musicians in the modern day classical entire world, but also jazz artists and New York minimalists like John Cage (who, in a 1958 essay, praised Satie’s innovations as “indispensable” to his have get the job done). Handful of, having said that, have been as thoroughly remodeled by Satie as Tokyo-dependent pianist Satsuki Shibano. Her lifelong fascination with the composer commenced in 1977 when, as a college college student, she attended a recital of Satie’s tunes at an art museum in Ikebukuro. “It turned out to be my starting off stage for recognition towards the idea of new music and the way it should be listened to,” Shibano stated of the knowledge.
Adhering to the live performance, Shibano arrived at out to Satoshi Ashikawa, the musician and report-shop owner who arranged the occasion, and questioned to be released to the pianist: Jean-Joël Barbier, a Satie historian from France who recorded the composer’s complete oeuvre of piano functions throughout a sequence of LPs. Barbier agreed to acquire Shibano on as a protégé and whisked her absent to Paris for two and a 50 % yrs of intense research. On her return to Japan in 1982, Shibano played her individual recital of Satie compositions—and this time, Ashikawa approached her with a request. In the time that Shibano had been absent, Ashikawa experienced established his Seem Method label and launched two albums in what he called the Wave Notation collection: Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ambient masterclass New music for 9 Postcards and his own Continue to Way, which took inspiration from Brian Eno’s Songs for Airports. He desired Shibano for the 3rd installment.
Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984 was conceived as a compilation of Satie’s “household furniture audio,” which proposed the concept of songs created to soundtrack every day life lengthy in advance of Eno or any individual else did. Ashikawa and Yoshimura were being developing a radical strategy of “environmental music” together, in which the parts they composed had been inextricably joined with sites. Satie’s household furniture songs was fundamental to this idea Japan was at the apex of a renewed fascination in his work. (One national newspaper termed it a “quiet increase.”) But there was an abrupt change of programs Ashikawa passed away in a auto incident only a calendar year just after commissioning the album, and Shibano was left to full it on her have. She opted for solo piano, performed without having accompaniment. It is just Shibano and her muse.