Yours Sincerely: Haruomi Hosono downsizes to a music box

Yours Sincerely is 26 minutes long and never lifts its voice once. Haruomi Hosono's first album of original material in almost ten years consists of ten small pieces of doo wop, ambient and gamelan, with an eleven-second trailer left sitting at the end of the tracklist, and it is the gentlest record he has ever put his name to.

His career has lasted long enough that it reads like multiple careers piled atop one another. He performed bass in Apryl Fool, the psychedelic group whose 1969 album placed his name before a Japanese public. Next came Happy End, the folk-rock quartet he founded alongside Takashi Matsumoto, Eiichi Ohtaki and Shigeru Suzuki, and afterward Tin Pan Alley, the collective that did session work for other artists, Yumi Arai among them. His debut solo record, Hosono House, appeared in 1973, and the albums following it drifted through exotica, film soundtracks and electronic ambient with none of them becoming confessional. Paraiso, in 1978, is where Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi joined him, and that trio turned into Yellow Magic Orchestra. Both of his well-known bands operated through irony, pop about pop, subject matter more apt to be Pacific imperialism than heartbreak. He is now YMO's only living member, following the deaths of Sakamoto and Takahashi.

Yours Sincerely arrives on 11 September, released in Japan via Echoes Baa and Sony Music Entertainment Japan, featuring artwork from Harune Horigome and mastering by Goh Hotoda. Hosono has characterized the album's theme as a maternal force: 'humanity's understanding of the unconditional love possessed by those who give us life.' He has termed maternal compassion and mercy deeply buried instincts, the sort daily life seldom reaches. The record does not make the argument. It acts as though the argument were already closed.

The sound is a small, curious blend of doo wop, gamelan and ambient, drifting and nearly beatless. Beats hardly arrive, and when they do they carry about as much force as a heartbeat heard through a wall. The playing is close-miked and startlingly clear: xylophones, ukuleles, pianos, clicking fingers, tablas, chimes, synths that gurgle rather than swell. Hosono sings, half speaks and croons, and female backing vocalists step in now and then for short monologues. The whole thing sits in a hush.

'Sincerely', the second track, turns a 1954 hit by The Moonglows into something near a hum. 'Ayurveda' is the record's croon, easy listening in its Americanised Pacific island style, with tablas and chimes moving beneath a line about M for Mama, M for Money. 'M for Mandala' is the oddest cut here, drawing in the synthetic Bollywood of his 1978 album Cochin Moon and the bamboo music he and the other members of Yellow Magic Orchestra were constructing in the early 1980s. 'Rojiura (Walking Vibration)' is the longest piece at 4:06 and the album's hinge, a mantric, half-spoken synth miniature closer in kind to his 1993 ambient album Medicine Compilation From the Quiet Lodge than to anything with a chorus.

'Humming Dream of Love' starts up a music box rendition of Liszt's Liebesträume, layers in ukulele and burbling synth, and closes with Hosono humming the melody like a man hums while pottering about his own house. 'Anemo Wheel' is the fantasy one, a softer take on the video game music he was already making in 1984, all 16-bit forest and sea. 'Note of Mothership' begins the record with the same mantric half-speech, a hand on the shoulder before anything starts.

If Medicine Compilation From the Quiet Lodge, Pacific or Bon Voyage Co happens to be near the turntable, or if ambient albums are left playing softly all afternoon, play it. Don't visit for Yellow Magic Orchestra's technopop, or for Happy End folk-rock in contemporary fidelity. There's no beat to grasp, and nothing on the record that endures being made louder.

The problem is the length of the tracks. They're fragments, and fragments don't build: ten sketches at this scale produce a mood rather than a statement, and 'Sincerely' ends before it has developed. The eleven-second trailer at the close is the one piece that shouldn't be included, a promotional clip kept in the sequence. That's the gap between a very good album and a bigger one, and Hosono has never appeared drawn to the latter.

Four, then, and earned. Twenty-six minutes, no filler, no raised voice: a man with fifty years of solo records behind him choosing the smallest gesture available and landing it. Then eleven seconds of trailer, and he is gone.

The tracklist

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