Hiroshi Yoshimura

Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940-2003) wrote music meant to be lived in rather than listened to: sound logos for museums, quiet scores for train stations and galleries, a fragrance soundtrack commissioned by a cosmetics company, and an album for a prefab-house builder. Born in Yokohama, he worked first as a conceptual artist and visual poet in Tokyo's post-Fluxus scene before making his 1982 debut with Music for Nine Post Cards, home-recorded on a keyboard and Fender Rhodes for the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Green, Surround and later Quiet Forest followed, built from slow, unhurried melodies that sometimes shared the room with birdsong and running water. He was barely known outside Japan in his lifetime. Fourteen years after his death, a recommendation algorithm found him, a run of estate-approved reissues followed, and the composer once nicknamed "the cloud man" is now counted among the founders of kankyō ongaku.