The Ground Quietly Illuminated

The music Hiroshi Watanabe releases, either under his own name or as Kaito, shares a featherlight sensibility – it’s always in the ether, not quite of this earth. He’s probably best known, still, for a string of albums on German techno label Kompakt, where his music took two distinct forms: a weightless, candyfloss-scented deep trance, or an ambience so driftily diffuse, yet wetly melodic and melancholic, it sounded like tears drying on windowpanes. Since drifting from the Kompakt mothership, he’s been self-releasing material on Bandcamp that feels more exploratory, somehow, but shares a similar mood. The Ground Quietly Illuminated collapses those two approaches – beats and beatless – into one album, and works beautifully for it, though Watanabe’s traded the seeming-endlessness of trance for shuffling downtempo rhythms, deployed to hypnotic effect on the fifteen-minute centrepiece, “Persistence of Motion.” But it’s those ambient interludes that are most compelling; they seem slight at first blush, but there’s something richly rewarding about the way textures slip, slide and sway through the three “Fragments” on here. Imagine if Eno got hold of Tangerine Dream’s arpeggiator and landed somewhere just south of The KLF’s Chill Out or those early, lusciously playful Orb albums.