Teshi's Fine Hour: Japanese Ambient - Kankyō Ongaku with B.Forest

Teshi’s Fine Hour is a listening session dedicated to hyper-specific genres of music. Each episode features a guest who highlights a moment in popular music history that is often overlooked or under-discussed.

For this session, we are joined by B.Forest, a Paris-based record collector and professional appreciator of Japanese music, to explore Japanese ambient music of the 80’s, also known as Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music).

So what is Kankyō Ongaku? It is not simply Japanese ambient music that appears on your YouTube recommendations. It is a way of thinking about the relationship between music and the world around us.

From Satie’s furniture music to Ashikawa’s environmental experiments, it evolved through Japan’s postwar urbanization, technology and consumer culture. It became music for spaces, for nature, for advertising, and for healing. But the movement was never as coherent or as purely spiritual as we might imagine today.

Together, we will look at its complex history that travelled through commercialism, intimacy, functional and artistic, that illustrated urban and naturalistic lifestyle of 80’s Japan.

Date: Oct 24
Door opens: 15:00
Talk Begins: 16:00

Location:
NOTRE DAME Music Bar
6 rue Emile Lepeu,
Paris, France

Entry: 10 EUROS
RSVP Recommended.

About B.Forest:

Baptiste Forest is a French creator and record collector whose body is in Paris and whose mind seems to always be somewhere near Tokyo.

Ever curious about all things Japanese, his interests have led him deep into the maze of Japanese music, from jazz and ambient to pop and electronic music. After more than ten years of collecting records, he began sharing the stories behind some of his favorite music on social media.

Beyond the sound itself, Baptiste is interested in the cultural context, places, people and stories that shaped the music he loves. He has also collaborated with several music labels to help bring attention to reissues of lesser-known Japanese music, with a particular focus on ambient and experimental sounds.

About Teshi:
Self-claimed Berlin’s nerdiest music nerd from Japan, Teshi has worked at Kyoto’s legendary Jet Set Records, written for the Fader and the Japan Times, and ran a successful bilingual music blog for over 15 years. Now based in Berlin, he hosts Teshi’s Fine Hour, a monthly listening and talking session dedicated to overlooked and under-appreciated music genres. Proud radio show host of Radio AlHara, and Yaraka Radio.