Akira Kosemura

Polaroid Piano (15th Anniversary Edition)

$34.00

A note from Lawrence English
Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano is a record that is very close to my heart. In fact, it is Akira’s work that was one of the drivers for Someone Good, one of the Room40 sibling labels, to be founded.

Polaroid Piano marks the beginning of what would later become known as felt piano music, an approach to the piano which was picked up by numerous artists across subsequent years. It captures an essential and intimate rendering of the piano at close proximity, but it does more than that, it allows the piano to breathe within the places around it.

Structurally, the record is a collection of piano-led vignettes. Each piece is a microcosm of lived in music, which is porous, and opens themselves outward, inviting a sense of time and ’the present’ to seep into the music. They feel instantly intimate and evocative, melodies imprinted with the world around them. In some of the recordings a siren calls out from beyond the immediate acoustic space of the studio, whilst in others birds seep in and the rustling of Akira’s clothing folds into the music itself.

When we first discussed the recording, Akira had invited me to offer some sounds that might act as a leaping off point for the compositions. I collected a series of field recordings which were offered as simple and suggestive prompts, and as a means of imagining ‘other’ environments which might be simultaneously in orbit of the places Akira was recording in. Some of those field recordings are captured in the record, like a memory being recounted at a distance of time.

Polaroid Piano is a unique record for many reasons. One is it manages to manifest an acoustic transcription of that ‘momentary' quality of its photographic namesake. The pieces are auditory snapshots and reflect a certain quality of harmonic light and timbral exposure that is unquestionably tethered to the aesthetics of the polaroid format. It is a record that celebrates the body of the instrument as a sound source and invites us to be proximate to the resonation, and the living qualities of sound, that make music so utterly profound, and gratifying. 

Guitar – Muneki Takasaka (tracks: 2, 5, 9, 10)
Mastered By – Lawrence English at Negative Space
Mixed By – Akira Kosemura
Photography – Yuma Saito
Field Recordings – Lawrence English (tracks: 5, 9, 10)

ONE OF THE MOST STREAMED ASIAN CLASSICAL ARTISTS

When Akira Kosemura started making music, it was a kind of therapy during his difficult time in his early 20s. He carried an audio recorder to capture the soundscape he encountered, and those field recordings inspired him to create music with his piano. “My original reason for making it, after all, was to heal myself, a kind of rehabilitation technique and it is still part of my everyday life, or perhaps an extension of it. It’s like breathing for me” he recalls.

Since his record debut in 2007, Kosemura’s compositions have been reflecting his inner voice, and drawing various images silently and beautifully – from quiet nights, four seasons, to some stories about unknown people in unknown world. He garnered attention worldwide, collaborated with notable musicians such as John Legend and Devendra Banhart, and created scores for films/TV drama/video games like the Cannes featured film True Mothers (2020), Hollywood produced drama series Love Is__ (2018), the Nintendo Switch game Jack Jeanne (2021), TV anime Honey Lemon Soda (2025), and so many others. Completely self-taught composer/pianist has become one of the most streamed Asian classical artists, has signed Decca Records/Universal Music in 2022, and released diverse records including his renowned solo piano album, SEASONS (2023).

Now in 2025, Kosemura looks at a new direction. MIRAI (means “future” in Japanese) is his first-ever vocal project album featuring 7 notable singers – Devendra Banhart, Mr Hudson, Baths, Benjamin Gustafsson, Saro, Tom Adams, and Miyuki Hatakeyama.

“I came up with this project as I felt a sense of division during the COVID pandemic” says Kosemura. As a father raising his son, his focus on making music has been shifted from his inner voices to the message for next generations, and he decided to set the concept of this record to describe the future from his personal perspective with music, for future era.

Based on his background and experiences as a Japanese and composer, MIRAI unites various elements from Asian traditional instruments, film soundtrack to post-rock, neo-classical and electronica, in his one-of-a-kind musicality and several languages, just like post-war Japanese culture developed uniquely with the influence from western countries. The result is so colorful – we can hear the influences from post-rock such as Mogwai and Sigur Ros on ‘Atlas’ featuring Tom Adams, see ambient worlds featuring field recordings of songs of Nagas in Myanmar on ‘SECAI’ and ‘Lore’, and feel gentle winds in the mountains on ‘Autumn Moon’ featuring Miyuki Hatakeyama, which lyrics are cited from Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a classical Japanese anthology of one hundred Japanese waka by one hundred poets.

Says Kosemura, “It was a great time for me to be able to bring out the various musical elements that influenced me from my young age to the present and incorporate them one by one into the album. We would travel diverse worlds through the record, and it ends with utopian Japanese music. I wrote the last track ‘Ongaku’ with the image of a Japanese festival that doesn’t actually exist. The ending of the song is also a little fantastical, with the sound flying off somewhere, as it is intended to be listened to again by going back to the first song.”

“This is very different to SEASONS. This looks at the world from a very different perspective” says the composer. Featuring various instruments such as dilruba, erhu, shakuhachi, koto, shamisen and many others, MIRAI is his phantasmal statement for the future, as well as his journey to the utopia of music.

“It feels impossible to get tired of, circumscribed and boundless at once.”
by Pitchfork

“Fantastic stuff.”
by Gilles Peterson

“Peaceful, evocative music”
by Fact Magazine