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Elizabeth Alker steps back into the glitz and excess of Japan during the 1980s, when the Yen dominated global markets, and a housing boom the likes of which the world had never seen transformed Tokyo into a vital and chaotic metropolis.

In the midst of all that freneticism lies a hidden chapter in the global history of the avant-garde: Japan’s Kankyo Ongaku movement, where groundbreaking composers, bolstered by corporate patronage, reimagined the function of music in an increasingly fast-paced society. Influenced by the likes of Brian Eno, John Cage, and Erik Satie, they proposed a new form of ambient music – one that would help guide Japan’s citizens through both private and public worlds.

When Japan’s economy collapsed in the 1990s, the output of these musicians was subsequently buried under the rubble of a burst bubble, but now, for the first time, it’s finding a new life with listeners in the West.

Elizabeth speaks to the corporations who funded this unlikely partnership (MUJI, Seiko, Wacoal), as well as the composers who benefited from it (Takashi Kokubo, Inoyama Land, Yoshio Ojima) in order to trace this unlikely instalment in the landscape of experimental composition, and to ask why we are only uncovering its output now.

Producer: Frank Palmer
A Tempo & Talker production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 3