Satomimagae

Taba voices a subtle yet surprising shift for the Japanese musician and producer Satomimagae. Observing and absorbing the fleeting scenes and sounds of life flowing outside of her home studio, Taba unfolds as a series of vignettes that document the personal and the universal. Satomi sings beyond herself in an orbit of souls and systems known and unknown, seen and unseen, in the present and in the strange flux of memory, leaving linear songwriting to rest for circuitous stories expanded and expansive in tone and texture.

Following the logic of taba, a Japanese term for a bunch, bundle or grouping together of different things, the album is assembled as a loose collection of short stories. Shapeshifting into something like a poet-narrator, Satomi casts her writer’s eye to the often perplexing shapes that form from quotidian events and exchanges defining our increasingly alienated age. Where Satomi’s last full-length, 2021’s Hanazono, bloomed from the lush soil of a private inner sphere, the bird’s eye of Taba searches to place the artist—somewhere, somehow—within a wider, wilder world.

“I was thinking about how we see people as a group and individuals within a group,” Satomi says. “How groups are connected and also how borders exist. The awareness that we are just one element in the collective (taba) and yet each individual’s invisible experiences and memories remain somewhere, influencing us, or society, without realizing it. We are small dots within a mass.”

The first murmurs of Taba can be heard surrounding Satomi’s song “Dots,” one of many shimmering points mapping the constellation of 2021’s Salutations compilation on RVNG Intl. Drawn from a deep well of drafts that Satomi recorded to her iPhone during the early pandemic, “Dots” was a wordless inner guide ushering her down a shadowy yet still inviting path. Intrigued and inspired, Satomi held this feeling close, experimenting with new chords, rhythms, and tempos within these new creative surroundings. But it was another exchange with sound artist duenn, transmitted on their collaborative album Kyokai, that conjured the spirit of Taba.

Kyokai’s theme of “something more than haiku but less than music” gave words to feeling, and activated an understanding that the sonic fragments Satomi was documenting were not simply unfinished sketches but potent formations. Setting aside her traditional folk song approach, and doing away with demos altogether, Satomi’s songwriting evolved into something closer to puzzling or patchworking with her cornerstone acoustic guitar and vocal connecting the pieces together into the imaginative arrangements heard throughout Taba.

Collaborations with other artists and musicians close to Satomi’s universe further elevate the album’s sweeping sonics. Synthesizer lines from Norio, who also helps define the album’s visual identity through photo and video, enliven the tender ballad “Kodama.” The bell-like Rhodes piano ringing in and around Satomi’s guitar on “Dottsu” is played by Akhira Sano, who created the cover art for her 2021 Colloid EP. Yuya Shito’s clarinet was the missing puzzle piece that completed “Spells,” and it was also Yuya who mixed Taba with an ear for its organic textures and elegantly frayed edges, giving utterance to a distinctly different energy than Satomi’s earlier expressions.

The tonal and rhythmic play that lay the foundation of these songs also animates a colorful palette of melodic gestures, noisy resonances and pointed moments captured by Satomi’s close-at-hand recorder. While Taba is still carried by the innate intimacy that has defined Satomi’s music to date, these songs channel her newly spacious and inquisitive songwriting approach, unlocking unusual layers in the process. Some are subsumed in the speculative poetics of sound design, while others peer through the window of bedroom pop.

Gathering imagistic reflections, tracing vast ideations and quietly lingering in humble moments, Taba connects  vivid lines between the individual and the collective, the constructed and the cosmic, the articulated and the felt. Satomi’s sonic tales gain an eloquent coherence by the simple fact of existing in conversation, humming a harmony of parts that buzzes with the tangled circuitry of a life in motion.

Satomimagae’s Taba will be released on vinyl, Japanese import CD, and digital editions on April 25, 2025.