Maya Ongaku have announced their second album Nothing Space Music, due 7th August via Guruguru Brain and Bayon Production, alongside lead single ‘Astral Echoes’.
The trio, Tsutomu Sonoda, Ryota Takano and Shoei Ikeda, formed in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima on Japan’s Shonan coast and released their debut album Approach to Anima in 2023 to international attention. Since then they have toured extensively across Japan and Europe, and the experience of that constant movement fed directly into the philosophy behind the new record.
To make Nothing Space Music, the band returned home and built an entirely new environment for themselves: Nothing Space Studio, a large soundproof building near a seaside shrine in their hometown, constructed specifically around the needs of this album. The concept at the record’s centre is what they call “shizen hassei” (spontaneous occurrence), described by Sonoda as approaching a vast expanse where memories of past, present and future drift together: “A place where sky and sea, shadow and light, sound and silence blend into one continuous whole.”
The album’s eight tracks were written, recorded and mixed entirely by the trio using acoustic guitars, Roland Juno-6 synthesisers, upright piano, Rhodes, a TR-8S drum machine and an unusual instrument called a sei, described as a “water whale.” Lead single ‘Astral Echoes’ captures the philosophy plainly: “I believe inspiration is not something to be chased or seized, but something that emerges when we patiently wait for its arrival in silence.”
Maya Ongaku play Tokyo’s Liquidroom on 4th July before a European tour, with UK dates including London’s Moth Club on 11th September.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source whynow.co.uk ’
