Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Environmental Music Is Enchanting a New Generation

When listeners discover the Japanese musician and visual artist Hiroshi Yoshimura for the first time, the experience is often a revelation. “I noticed how it activated everything,” said Dustin Wong, the experimental guitarist. “It was extremely generous.”

Patrick Shiroishi, the inventive Los Angeles-based instrumentalist, called Yoshimura a “god-level composer and musician who sits with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Vander and John Coltrane and Bela Bartok for me. They are so themselves.”

Yoshimura released most of his gentle and reflective albums of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, during the 1980s and ’90s. A descendant of Erik Satie’s furniture music and a cousin to Brian Eno’s ambient explorations, Yoshimura’s work put more of an emphasis on melody and warmth than its Western contemporaries. His compositions are often grounded by a soothing, vibrating hum underscoring largely electronic notes that fall like a pleasant weekend rainstorm. The spaces he created in his minimal, synthesizer-laden compositions allowed sounds from the outside world to exist harmoniously within the pieces. It’s music that doesn’t demand too much of your attention, but rewards close listening.

During his lifetime, Yoshimura remained a relatively obscure figure to those outside Japan. In recent years, his global audience has grown significantly, thanks in part to a series of reissues that have brought his music to streaming platforms for the first time. The latest, “Flora,” arrived on Thursday, the first day of spring, in a fitting tribute to how devotion to Yoshimura’s music and philosophy continues to bloom.

Many of Yoshimura’s recordings were created to be played at specific sites, like the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, or inside a range of prefabricated homes. “Flora” is a bit of mystery within his catalog. It was released only on CD in 2006, three years after his death at 63, from skin cancer. The scant information Yoshimura left behind about it included only its title, the song names and that it was from 1987 — the year after he released two of his most beloved collections, “Surround” and “Green.”