Loverly stuff, this, spotlighting an artist best known for working on the fringes of Japanese hip hop/R&B, but here following their solo nose for breezy keys rendered with subtle musique concrète and computer music production methods. It broadly breaks down into an A-side of utopian, vaporous but colourful vignettes and an immersively cinematic, durational B-side embracing negative space and timbral nuance. Both present Arai as a carefully sound sensitive composer with a finely synaesthetic grasp of materiality and curious ear for fleeting melody.

The first half speaks to the artist’s rumination on relationships between the senses, transmuting the natural and man-made worlds – flower petals, the ocean, a plastic sheet, a hand – into subtly surreal pieces of musical perfume (‘sky, sky’), psyche-diaristic collage (‘白日’), and aeolian lines of melodic thought (‘ocean, sea, ocean’). It stands in smart contrast to the other half’s ‘言の一端 / Communicating Vessels’, an attempt to convey the “unavoidable surplus that crops up in communication, whether of gestures or of language”, with a precisely sparing 17 minute work for keys, aleatoric rustles, animated with quiet sci-fi concrète that feels like Nozomu Matsumoto and James Ferarro making music for an abandoned space station terminus.