It turns out we had heard maya ongaku before. We just needed another album and a little internet archaeology to remember where.
In 2022, we saw Mong Tong open for Kikagaku Moyo on their farewell tour. A year later, Mong Tong returned to Urban Spree, this time sharing the bill with maya ongaku as they toured their first album, Approach to Anima. Inside that small underground venue, the two bands created completely different sonic universes and gave us somewhere else to step into for a while.
That Guruguru Brain connection is what brought us back. The label was founded by Kikagaku Moyo, who also chose maya ongaku to open their final-ever show in Tokyo. Being mentioned in the same sentence as them is already quite a compliment, although Nothing Space Music feels far removed from most of what Kikagaku Moyo are known for. There are faint echoes of Kumoyo Island, but pushing the comparison further would be a stretch. What survives is the same confidence in choosing the right instrument for the right moment, then leaving everything else out.
After several years of international touring, maya ongaku reacted to bigger venues and louder shows by retreating. Tsutomu Sonoda, Shoei Ikeda and Ryota Takano converted a soundproofed building near a seaside shrine in Shōnan into their own studio. There, away from the pace and volume of touring, they made an album about returning to silence and paying attention to the sounds that louder things tend to cover.
It is a story that fits the record perhaps a little too perfectly, but the music holds up without it.
The album takes us somewhere kind and far away, where we are welcomed rather than overwhelmed. Nostalgia lives alongside excitement for whatever comes next, while the present remains strange enough to be interesting. The band’s own idea of “Nothing Space” brings different moments in time together, so perhaps that feeling is not entirely ours alone.
We do not understand Japanese, which changes how Sonoda’s voice reaches us. Meaning recedes, but the emotion remains, and his singing becomes another instrument carrying something we cannot translate yet can still feel.
“Astral Echoes” may be the best representation of the whole album. Acoustic guitar and Sonoda’s voice sit among bass, Rhodes piano, clarinet, analogue synthesisers, drum machine and small percussion, with each sound appearing long enough to leave a trace before making room for another.
This is one to hear through proper headphones or a good hi-fi system. Try following the shaker-like pulse as it moves through the stereo field and notice the tiny sounds revealing themselves around it. The production rewards that kind of curiosity without turning the song into a technical exercise, because underneath all those details is a melody warm enough to carry the entire construction.
The lyrics suggest a similar state of suspension. Rain approaches, wind passes, time becomes dizzy and two stars continue swaying beside one another. The band describes inspiration as something you prepare to receive rather than chase, and “Astral Echoes” sounds like the moment it finally arrives.
“You Are Silence” pushes further into that stillness. A restrained guitar pattern establishes the song while a high synth line gradually becomes familiar enough to guide us through it. The track was written during Obon, when the spirits of ancestors are believed to return to the living for a few days. Sonoda imagined himself as one of those spirits, watching over someone he loved, and wrote a love song from the other side.
Even without knowing any of that, the affection survives the translation.
“Permanent Waves”, another of our favourites, closes the album with one of its simplest arrangements. Sonoda’s voice and acoustic guitar are joined by a Juno-6, a restrained kick drum and one of Takano’s unusual percussion instruments. The opening track is called “Vanishing Waves”, addressed to waves disappearing; the closing title means the opposite, a song for the waves that do not.
Rather than building towards some final eruption, the album simply arrives where it has been heading all along.
The Skinny argued that the album remains within such a narrow emotional and sonic register that it eventually “threatens to tip from immersive to monotonous.” We do not hear it that way. The record lives inside that calm and benefits from deep listening. Pay closer attention and it continues to open up.
That restraint could easily have resulted in tasteful emptiness. Maya ongaku instead fill the space with melody, ingenuity and an extraordinary cleanliness of purpose. There is no sonic fluff added for the love of fluff, and every instrument earns its place.
This album has grown on us considerably, to the point that it has become one we now press play on almost instinctively.
Nothing Space Music makes somewhere far away feel briefly close. Once it welcomes you in, returning becomes very easy.
Listen where you listen:
