Audiopile Review: Japanese trio Unknown Me follow-up their 2021 album Bishintai for the Not Not Fun imprint with Bitokagaku, another slip into ethereal bliss, besting their albums preceding it. While the trio’s lineup includes P-RUFF and Yakenohara, both busy with various other projects, the notable third member, H. Takahashi, has become a mainstay in the shop, issuing releases for Aguirre, Dauw, Where To Now?, and Not Not Fun, the latter doing a recent vinyl reissue of Escapism, his incredible 2018 cassette. He also has a new duo, H TO O, who have a forthcoming album for Wisdom Teeth, so stay tuned for that one. The songs here are commissioned by Shiseido, the Japanese cosmetics giant, Unknown Me following in the footsteps of predecessors like Yasuaki Shimizu, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Hiroshi Yoshimura, the latter of whom’s beloved album A・I・R (Air In Resort) was made for a Shiseido perfume. While much of the album is certainly ambient-forward and rooted in the long tradition of Japanese Environmental Music, the three-way collaboration (technically four if you include the non-musical role of Yudai Osawa, who is in charge of graphic design and video) results in an album that pulls in many directions at once. The slippery and glass-like ambience is given a pulse with featherlight drum machines, cascading synths and the odd field recording, emulsified into a slow-spinning sphere of bucolic new age, low-key IDM and lush ambient soundscaping. This is gonna be big for anyone into Japanese ambient and electronic music.

The second LP by Tokyo ambient conceptualists UNKNOWN ME began as a commission for historic Japanese cosmetic conglomerate Shiseido, conjuring audio approximations of seasons and scents, but soon flowered into its own refracted environment: Bitokagaku. Translated as “beauty and science,” the album is the foursome’s first composed solely with software, reflecting the collection’s utopian, laboratorial muse.

From levitational electronica (“A Rainbow in Meditative Air”) and vaporous downtempo (“Dancing Leaves”) to planetarium reverie (“Kitsune No Yomeiri”) and A.I. IDM (“Retreat Beats”), the music moves like weather patterns in a bio-dome: dazzling, microcosmic, and delicately calibrated. Percolating synths crossfade with field recordings from Shiseido’s research division; the sound of streams and distant birds blur into a processed haze; clinical voices read lists of precious stones. It’s a vision of new age as soft robotics, of serenity streamlined by sentient systems.

UM’s team of engineers (Yakenohara, P-RUFF, H. Takahashi, and Osawa Yudai) cite an eclectic swath of inspirations behind Bitokagaku – molecules, stars, Kenji Miyazawa, Akira Kurosawa, even “the sparkle of rainbows” – but their guiding artistic principle is as ancient as it is eternal: “beauty.”