EVERY GENRE PROJECT - January 25 - Amami shima-uta
Genre of the Day - Amami shimauta
Album of the Day - Amami by 朝崎郁恵 [Asazaki Ikue] & 高橋明 (1997)
Sometimes, you wake up with hope in your heart. Hope is good and beautiful, but more often I try to keep low expectations for myself so I don’t get hurt if something doesn’t play out the way I’d like it to, and I think this makes for a nice homeostasis in life—if a situation goes my way, great, if it doesn’t, so be it. Today I had my hopes really high because I’d applied to an internship program in Japan, and I really thought I would get it, and I actually thought results were coming out tomorrow, but instead out of the blue they came out today. I was rejected!!! Another devastating blow to the week, to be honest, but I feel that I must be experiencing some sort of karma for something at this juncture. Nonetheless, irony is even more cruel than rejection: on the day I found out I wouldn’t be going to Japan, I was given a Japanese regional folk subgenre to listen to. If I was feeling any stronger, I would’ve just clicked again and selected a different genre, but I’m genuinely just so resolute and defeated that I thought I’d let it play.
Enough solo-miserating; sometimes things just don’t happen, and you’re not entitled to them, and who knows, maybe I am having such a hard week to teach me some sort of lesson. But music always makes it better, and looking at pretty photos of tiny Japanese islands typically does too. Today’s genre is the tradition of Amami shimauta, hailing from the Amami Islands sitting between Okinawa and the main islands of Japan. Japan is a country we often take for granted as a nation state with a long history, but we forget that Japan exercised its own colonial tactics to subsume islands that were culturally distinct into the mainland’s political apparatus, whether up north on Hokkaido or down south on the Amami Islands and Ryukyu Islands. Thus, the musical traditions coming out of these southern island chains are distinctive, and definitely worth a consideration given these islands’ long history of being trapped between honoring their indigeneity and unique traditions, being part of a far away mainland Japan, and of course the American occupation that lasted for almost a decade following WWII.
The Amami singing style is one of the unique highlights of the genre, and the centerpiece of today’s album as well. Its unique facet is mostly the rapid fluctuation in and out of falsetto, as well as an emphasis on melisma. As a huge fan of the human voice and all of the cool things it can do (and mine can’t so easily), this was a huge draw. What I thought was also cool about Amami is its ambient flair; due to the local region’s obvious massive cultural connection to the ocean, recording musicians often add ocean noises to mimic the music in live form.
Today’s album is AMAMI by singer Asazaki Isue, and I found it quite spellbinding. The first half of the album is her voice with the aforementioned ocean sounds with an added layer of some typical New Age piano; some might find it middling, but I find these melodies honestly really beautiful, and the piano’s simplicity allows the complexity of the vocal approach to jump out. Isue’s vocal agility and the specific way she switches in and out of falsetto in a single phrase can’t really be described by any of the vocal terms I’m familiar with; as always, the music can say more than my layman words. The second half of the album is a more traditional experience, the piano sailing back to the mainland and all that is left is the ocean and her voice, plaintive and raw but flowing like the water layered underneath. Guess this is the closest I’ll get to feeling like I’m in Japan for a while.