Rei Harakami

It's hard to narrow it down to a few words when describing the feeling of Rei Harakami's music. Whimsical, relaxing, and melodic come to mind, but it feels like there are a whole lot of other adjectives that are necessary yet difficult to recall. If nothing else, Harakami puts out great tunes for listening to on the weekend when (hopefully!) your time is your own.

Between the smooth melodies, and absolutely great instrumentation chalk full of pads, bells, and organs (plenty of other stuff too, but these stand out the most), I find Harakami's works extremely absorbing. Listening to his music makes me want to hop on a bicycle and lazily bike around the outskirts of Kyoto or something in autumn. He's one of the first artists that I've listened to in quite some time where I feel absolutely compelled to track down all of his work, though that may prove to be a challenge as you'll read below.

He's put out a number of EPs over the last 10 years, as well as contributed to his fair share of soundtracks, and has been collaborating quite a bit with other artists (most notably Coldcut). The one HUGE challenge, though, is tracking down his music. Harakami does have all of his tracks available on the Japanese iTunes shop, but that means people outside Japan can't get the songs. One of the few remaining options, short of making a quick transoceanic flight, is to order the physical CDs from a place like Amazon Japan, in which case it may be better to buy a bunch of CDs at once to make the pricey international shipping fee more worthwhile. Other than that, maybe you'll be lucky to have a Book Off in your city (or know someone in LA, New York, or Vancouver who can check), and you could be even luckier to actually track one of Rei Harakami's albums down.

So, is it worth all the effort? I think so, but you can give his stuff a listen over here, and decide for yourself.