HARUKA NAKAMURA 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: Haruka Nakamura's Light Years: The North Face Sphere Spring & Autumn is a soundtrack that the Japanese composer created in response to a request from outdoor clothing brand The North Face to create an album for each of the four seasons. Two of his works feature here with changing acoustics, different melodies and gentle grooves conveying the evolving weather. The sounds have been made with various materials and instruments such as acoustic guitar, bass, sampling and chorus. It's a widescreen and immersive album where harmony and nostalgia happily coexist.

Review: Humble folk compositions from Haruka Nakamura, a longtime fixture of the Tokyo singer-songwriter scene. From the outset, we can almost instantly tell the theme of Nakamura's 2018 album Grace: it's a waltzing meditation on daily life and lightly passed time - and our research proves this to be correct, with the album having been made carefully over three parts of a daily cycle. A crude but elegant blend of lo-fi elements, glorious soprano vocals and rough samplework make for an emotionally wide-ranging listen, from the outset of 'every day' to the closing 'cadenza'.

Review: Tokyo-based Haruka Nakamura is a producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in the snowy hills of Aomori. The natural beauty, peace and calm of that upbringing no doubt informs the delightfully delicate and elegant modern classical music he makes. The Toudai label has a super new serving of it here on the seance volume of his StilL life series. It's plaintive and was created on with Mute piano over the course of a month and has sound as soft as light and also comes with a written diary the artist made during the writing sessions, which is well worth finding online.

Review: Hydeout Productions have been carrying Haruka Nakamura's work since 2013's Melodica, and now they're back in partnership for the gorgeous contemporary classical lilt of Nujabes Pray Reflection. The album is a tribute to the late Japanese beat producer Nujabes, considered a godfather of hip-hop in the vein of J Dilla until his untimely passing. Nakamura's work centres around classically-trained piano composition reinterpreting some of Nujabes' beats, but it happily takes in a broad tapestry of instrumentation to create vivid, expansive pieces rich with sentimentality. The entire 12-track run is beautiful and elegant without fail, shining some of these treasured beats in a whole new, previously unimaginable light.