When Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura made the music on Flora, he was pretty much without peer in the world of ambient music. Album to album and idea to idea, his only competition circa 1987 might have been Steve Roach, but while that Californian motocross aficionado approached his work with the auteurist fury you’d associate with someone like Brian Wilson, Yoshimura was happy making music that resembled the sounds of leaves blowing in the wind or animals rustling in the underbrush. Perhaps the boldness with which he approaches his ideas on Flora, in contrast to the clean lines and simple strokes that define his earlier work, explains why he never released these pieces; they were only posthumously compiled in 2006, three years after his passing. Yoshimura was a working musician keenly attuned to music’s utilitarian aspects; his 1986 masterpiece Surround was originally intended as a soundtrack to a series of prefab homes. But it’s hard to imagine Flora as functional music: These pieces bloom and sprawl in every direction, planting roots in the ear instead of simply accentuating the space in which they’re being played.
Flora is being reissued by Temporal Drift, which put out a vinyl edition of Surround in 2023 and frames Flora as the “chronological and stylistic follow-up” to that album. Yoshimura might bristle at the idea that his work could slot into such a tidy narrative, but Flora also challenges the image of the Japanese composer as a pragmatic freelancer. Flora is the most album-like of his releases, in the sense of taking the listener on a journey rather than existing in space like Surround or the runway soundtrack Pier & Loft. There are bits where the music fades into a rosy blur in the corners of the subconscious, as when the druidic nighttime music of “Asagao” smears into the brief piano étude “Ojigisou,” but more often it pokes at the ear like a mischievous sprite. “Over the Clover” opens with a leap-frog synth melody as playful as anything Yoshimura composed, but when a loudly mixed saloon piano plays a spectacularly ungraceful grace note, you know you’re in for a messier listen than you usually get from this most meticulous musician.
The album’s 11 tracks feel like a set of gardens opening onto more gardens. The songs aren’t exceptionally long by Yoshimura’s standards, typically five or six minutes, but rather than thrumming in the air, like the immovable pieces on his debut Music for Nine Post Cards, they unfurl. Every time “Over the Clover” threatens to get lost in its own thickets, it finds its way back to its introductory riff, a simple and sublime melody in league with his much-loved standout “Blink.” The title track is built on cottony electric piano puffs so delicate they would seem to blow away in the wind and scatter pell-mell, yet they stay strong throughout a six-minute epic. “Maple Syrup Factory” is beyond delightful, a sojourn to the American wilderness painted in festive synthetic pianos and sour angel choirs. Best of all is “Adelaide,” which starts as a simple and true synth piece similar to Roach’s “Structures from Silence” or Aphex Twin’s “#3” and then gradually gets dirtier: a brookish trickle here, a droplet there, until its almost unnatural perfection is replaced by something more lifelike.