FEATURE: Spotlight: Hinako Omori — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Luca Bailey

Hinako Omori

_________

THE latest album from…

Hinako Omori comes in the form of this year’s stillness, softness... It is a remarkable work from an artist I must admit I was not familiar with until recently. I have seen her tipped by other sites, so I set out to find more about her. A remarkable talent, I think that everyone needs to get involved with her music. I am going to get to some interviews. First, from her Bandcamp page is some details about stillness, softness... It is an album that everyone needs to seek out:

“For Hinako Omori, synthesisers are a portal to the subconscious. Far from being sterile or austere, “synths really do respond to how you’re feeling,” says the London-based artist, producer and composer. “There have been times where I’ve felt stressed and my synth would go out of tune. I took it to a repair place once, thinking that something was wrong with it, but it was fine; I think it was to do with my energy levels. So when I sit down and write something, whatever comes out is relevant to how I feel in that moment because the synthesiser is responding to it. The music really becomes a map of my emotions.”

If her highly critically acclaimed debut ‘a journey…’ (2022, Houndstooth) was about healing others with its soothing sounds, Omori’s next album unexpectedly became one of healing herself. Looking back at the lyrics to ‘stillness, softness…,’ “it was very much an inner journey of uncovering stuck points within myself and coming to a sense of peace with them,” she says. Omori was particularly taken by the idea of our shadow selves – the dark parts of ourselves that we keep hidden – and the need to reconcile with them in order to break free. “The relationship with ourselves is consistent, and when it's healed, wonderful things can come from that,” she adds.

Since 2022’s critically acclaimed debut album, ‘a journey…’, Hinako Omori has fast become one of the UK’s most compelling breakthrough musicians, blurring the lines between classical, electronic and ambient. A concept album inspired by the ancient Japanese ritual of forest bathing, a journey…’s lush textures, rooted in nature, were called “remarkable” by Pitchfork and received heavy rotation on BBC 6Music. Omori’s potent blend of therapeutic frequencies, drones and her ethereal falsetto connected: she has since supported Beth Orton, Anna Meredith and Ichiko Aoba, played with a 60-piece orchestra for BBC Radio 3’s Unclassified and, later this year, will join Floating Points’ esteemed ensemble at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to perform Promises, his collaborative album with the late Pharoah Sanders.

‘stillness, softness…’ explores a new sonic range within Omori’s world of analogue synths – namely, her Prophet ’08, the Moog Voyager and UDO Super 6, an analogue hybrid synthesizer that creates binaural, 3D-simulating sound. The album is darker, more expansive and more noirishly theatrical than her previous work. Whereas Omori’s debut was largely instrumental, here the vocals are front and centre – “it’s more vulnerable,” she nods – as she opens up on themes of dreams versus reality, solitude, reconnecting with who you are and, ultimately, finding strength in yourself.

Omori calls ‘stillness, softness…’ “a collage of experiments” which she then pieced together “like a puzzle”, each song representing a memory room. The end result is seamless, a continuous cycle of 13 vignettes that flow in and out of each other, recorded and written between her bedroom in London and her grandmother’s house in Yokohama, Japan. “It was very DIY,” she laughs. “I was whispering into the microphone because I didn’t want to wake anyone up.”

Omori was born in Japan but grew up in south London and studied sound engineering at the University of Surrey. Her interest in machine music began before that, in college, thanks to a teacher who introduced his class to analogue synthesizers. “It sparked a curiosity in me,” says Omori. “I grew up learning classical piano, and the minute I came across synthesizers for the first time it completely drew me in. With a synth, you get to truly sculpt the sound: it opened up all these endless possibilities for expression that I had never even thought about before.”

After university, she joined the touring bands for both indie musicians and arena acts including EOB, James Bay, KT Tunstall, Georgia and Kae Tempest, the latter of whom Omori still plays with regularly. “I’ve learned so much from those experiences,” says Omori. “If it wasn’t for working with these wonderful artists, I don't think I would have had the confidence to do what I’m doing now.” Her confidence, she says, is still a work in progress, which is partly what the album speaks to. Its title might be ‘stillness, softness…’ but the album is actually about making yourself uncomfortable in order to grow. “It’s about embracing the things that we want to hide away from, and that we feel ashamed of,” she says.

The album on the whole is Omori’s most accessible yet, and one that evidences her true range as a composer, artist, arranger, vocalist and synth virtuoso. It closes with the title track, completing the cycle. “I wanted it to evoke a state of peace that you reach within yourself,” says Omori. “I think of it as a blanket of sorts, very gentle, very calming.” That softness, she says, is the ultimate strength – and one that will guide us through life with love and compassion for ourselves and others”.

I am going to come to some 2023 interviews with the amazing Hinako Omori soon. Before that, Fifteen Questions learned more about a stunning composer and artist. Someone who I hope gets so many more people heading her way next year. I have only recently found her. I am determined to follow her career closely. Omori is a singular talent of immense stature and gravitas:

“Name: Hinako Omori

Nationality: Japanese

Occupation: Musician

Current Release: a journey… on Houndstooth

Recommendations: Backside of the Moon by James Turrell - I’m endlessly inspired by James' work. By some synchronicity, when we’ve been on tour I’ve ended up in cities with James’ installations without knowing they were there beforehand - it’s been a magical way to discover his work almost by way of synchronicity! My favourite piece of his is in Naoshima, Japan - you walk into a seemingly pitch black space, and after adjusting to the environment for a while you notice there’s been a light there all this time. It takes your breath away. /Trans-Millenia Music by Pauline-Anna Strom - the most otherworldly, magical sound worlds and sonic atmospheres imaginable. Completely timeless and boundless, and ever evolving. Every time I listen to it, I discover something completely new. In the liner notes for this album, Pauline-Anna wrote “I consider myself the ‘Trans-Millenia Consort’, by which title I wish to be known. This to me is a personal declaration that I have been in previous lives, that I am in this life, and that I shall in future lives be a musical consort to time.”.

When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started learning the piano when I was 5 from a wonderful teacher called Anne Hodgkinson. I think there’s something so important about the connection with a teacher, and Mrs Hodgkinson was so inspiring, kind, caring and so patient with me.

I started experimenting with writing/producing much later on, perhaps around 4 years ago - mainly with small snippets of synth recordings which were saved away on a hard drive until I found a home for them in a song or piece. I’d become fascinated by synthesisers through my Music Technology teacher at college Lloyd Russell, who was in an electropop band at the time - he was a synth genius and definitely inspired me to delve into synths and the magical sound worlds you can create with them. He also suggested the sound engineering course I went on to study at University of Surrey, for which I’m very grateful for.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

As a listener, perhaps the identity side ties in in terms of where I’m physically based at the time and the music that’s being created or performed directly around in this physical space - I feel very lucky to be based in such a multicultural city as London, with an abundance of creativity that surrounds us.
As for the creating side of things, I’d be interested to hear from the listener’s perspective of what they feel from listening to my music - everything is subject to perception, and I’d love to keep things as open as possible without necessarily tying an identity to it, to allow space for it to be perceived by the listener in their own way.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Experimenting with pieces of equipment has been the main starting point for the projects I’ve been working on - sometimes having no real plan or structure behind how something may turn out and seeing what comes naturally can take you on a fun and unexpected journey.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

That’s a really interesting question! I think my answer would be a nice balance of both. I guess perhaps there is sometimes an underlying element in things that are created now in which we are continuing a tradition, in a sense, by way of having been inspired by something we’ve seen or have learned in the past - so we’re holding the torch and continuing with this idea, honouring it. Of course that’s not to say that there are so many new things that will arise that haven’t been thought of or realised before, but it’s nice to think that there’s a magical thread piecing together the different journeys that each individual has been through to get to where they are now, and what has inspired them along the way.

The state of perfection is something that is very difficult to perceive - what is perfect to one person may not seem that way to another - and the same with timelessness - but perhaps in a sense if the creator is happy and satisfied with a body of work and releases it into the world, it becomes a timeless entity to which people can connect with indefinitely going forward”.

There are a couple of recent interviews that I want to bring in. In November, Magnetic Magazine spoke with someone who was capturing natural sounds. There are artists who blend this into their work, though Hinako Omori’s process and angle seems to be a little different. The way that she finds sounds that take her work to new places. Whether you call it strictly music or something else, this is a blend of the natural world and studio coming together perfectly:

“CAPTURING NATURE

Before the studio visit, Omori researched the area to find the types of natural sounds she wanted to capture. She was especially interested in the rustling of leaves in the wind and the cleansing qualities of water, and she made a point of scheduling a visit to the Chew Valley Lake to record aquatic movement for the song “Ocean.”

On the day, she and the studio’s head engineer, Katie May, drove to the nearby Mendip Hills, equipped with a Neumann KU100 binaural microphone shaped like a human head and designed to record 3D audio. “It allowed us to capture sound that felt like you were in the space, rather than just a stereo recording,” she explains. “It was a phenomenal, massive recording.”

But, even with a lot of pre-planning and research of the area, the art of field recording typically depends on the natural offerings of the moment. “It’s nature,” she says, “and you can’t predict what’s going to come out, what you can record.” It requires a lot of patience to capture the essence of a scene over time.

INTUITIVE COMPOSING

“It would have probably been a very different record had it not been for the invitation [from Real World],” she admits. There were only a couple of weeks from when she accepted until the studio date, so she had to assemble the music quickly to prepare for the session. Luckily, Omori’s approach to composition is rather intuitive – she gathers and makes sounds, rearranging and experimenting with them until they merge into a harmonious work, much like a collage.

“It kind of mapped itself out. I started piecing together the melodies and keys, and found that the next one was starting in that same key. It’s almost like the music was telling me which order to put them in. So I kind of just went with it.”

She employed the same approach when mixing the record and weaving in the field recordings. Other than the deliberately sought-out water sounds for “Ocean,” most of the audio she picked up was recorded instinctively and then allowed to fit organically around the existing work, “rather than specifying ‘oh I definitely want this sound here,’” she says. “Weirdly, it didn’t feel forced… And I didn’t want to change the sounds of nature in any way because it is a map of where we were. And so none of it’s [produced with] effects, there’s no processing on it. I just wanted to make it as it is.”

STORYTELLING

It might not be surprising that an artist with such a connection to the natural environment feels compelled to preserve it, too. “With music,” she explains, “I feel like we have a unique opportunity to directly connect with people’s feelings.” So, for a project with the BBC, she reimagined Vaughan Williams’ best-known work, “The Lark Ascending,” in an electronic arrangement to highlight the UK’s declining bird population. “I got the score of Vaughan Williams sent over from the archives and was lucky enough to have the space to experiment with that and create something new.”

She was careful to stay faithful to the original score out of respect for the composer. The innovative part of the project came from her choice of instrumentation – she used the field recordings of the lark’s song to recreate the original violin melody, which required a lot of careful, detailed editing. She was surprised by the variety that appeared from a recording that initially sounded like a series of simple tones. “Every millisecond has an inflection or a melody or something. You think it’s one note, and then you dive in and discover there are probably 50 notes in here. So that was a joy to sit with.”

Her contributions to Brian Eno’s charity project, Earth/Percent, were created with a similar goal. The organization encourages artists to pledge a small percentage of their income to be distributed between various climate interventions, including energy transition, climate conservation, climate justice, and policy change. Omori contributed works to the organization’s two most recent Earth Day compilations – first in 2022, with a vocal interpretation of Michio Miyagi’s “Haru no umi” [“The Sea in Spring”], which was composed for the Japanese instruments koto and shakuhachi in 1929”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Almeida

I am going to wrap this up with an interview from The Line of Best Fit. They spent time with someone who, in their words, surrenders to the magic of the unknown. Even if you are not a fan of Ambient music, I think that Hinako Omori’s music definitely needs to be checked out. The beautiful and powerful stillness, softness… is too good to be ignored. I am interested to see what comes from her next year:

“These thoughts and each song on stillness, softness... represent what Omori coins as a “memory room”, connected by neural corridors. In making a continuous album, Omori shows how different memories can be accessed which inform another to emulate a stream of consciousness. While music is a collaborative experience for many, Omori is an artist who can only create alone. This solitary endeavour manifests as a pensive meditation, the sonic palette of stillness, softness being all at once melancholy and hopeful, before finding peaceful equilibrium. However, when it came to sharing the clutch of singles preceding the album, – the pensive “ember”, introspective shift of “foundation” and “in full bloom”, and the propulsive “cyanotype memories” – the prospect of vulnerability became daunting.

“When you start sharing it with other people, I have noticed that I definitely feel more vulnerable because there were more lyrics this time and that perhaps has a certain energy around these songs now,” Omori explains. “But, at the same time, there was something inside me that felt I needed to share this. We are all existing in this world together. It’s almost like a puzzle where we’re figuring out certain situations. There is a sense of togetherness; vulnerability can be a really beautiful thing.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Almeida

While stillness, softness... deals with the healing of Omori herself, her 2022 debut album, a journey…, focused on the healing of others. Originally written for WOMAD Festival’s online programme during lockdown after receiving an invite by organiser and producer Oli Jacobs, whom Omori studied alongside at the University of Surrey, Omori explored ways to bring nature’s therapeutic qualities indoors. “In Japan, we have a phrase called ‘shinrin-yoku’, which is forest bathing. Time outside and within trees has such a beautiful, calming effect on us [and] our bodies; I wanted to make an aural representation of that.” Incorporating sounds from the scenic abode of Real World Studios, where the project was finished, its lightness is at odds with its successor.

Omori’s intuitive playing is propelled by the emotional connection she feels with her synth, a sentiment she first explored as a college student when her teacher leant her a classic 80s SH101. Adverse to manuals, she instead displayed an inquisitive naivety in learning its workings and describes the instrument’s dynamic range as a “treasure box” to explore, with a lot of love imbued into it by its creator. “What were they thinking and feeling when they made it? Each [synth] has its own sonic character; getting to know that is like getting to know a friend. The more time you spend with someone, the more intimately you get to know the inner workings.”

It is a curiosity that has never left her, but Omori finds comfort in not being tied to the outcome, and stillness, softness... has opened a lot of doors in her mind in regards to listening to her own intuition. “Ultimately, we have all the answers within; we can surrender to the unknown and have faith that things will unfold in the best way. There is magic in the unknown”.

I am going to end it there. Go and check out this incredible artist. She is someone who is truly remarkable. Having delivered a celebrated headline show at London’s ICA earlier in the month, it is clear there are a lot of supporters behind her. People who really connect with her music. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Hinako Omori, then do make sure that you follow her. Being drawn into her sonic world is…