Masayoshi Fujita announces new album, Forest of Tranquility

Forest of Tranquility follows Fujita's 2024 album Migratory and was made out of his commission to create the soundtrack for Expo 2025's vast living nature installation in Osaka, which featured a central pond and 1,500 real trees rescued from the Expo's former 1970 site. "Portal To The Universe" arrives as the first preview of the album, as Fujita says: "This song was made as the last song of a day. It feels like you are slowly drifting in the vast universe and the sea of memory." Fujita's acoustic instruments, which include the marimba, vibraphone and percussion, with Armenian duduk from Hayk Karoyi and Japanese shō from Mattias Hållsten, come together to demonstrate nature's design, with additional field recordings of birds and frogs and drone sounds that mimic the sound of the wind. "I wanted to have a lot of space in between the sounds," Fujita says. For the original commission, Fujita made compositions that react to the weather using a sensor system installed at the exhibit, creating three versions of each two-hour piece — sunny, cloudy and rainy — with textures modified depending on the climate. The album moves across different trails that shift in tone according to the time o...