Yosuke Fujita’s (aka FUJI||||||||||TA) music whispers, filling rooms with just a hint of movement like a breeze as it ripples through the atmosphere. His handmade organ consists of pipes that he pumps full of air, methodically pulling a lever up and down to make his rhythmic drones. And while winding drones often feel free of time, Fujita upends this expectation: His music embraces the rhythmic vibration of a long-held note and its overtones, building layers from oscillating tones. On MMM, he takes a more complex approach to his rhythms yet still maintains a sense of fluidity that evokes the motions of nature.
Fujita cites gagaku, a form of Japanese classical music more than 1,200 years old, as one of his central inspirations. Particularly, he’s drawn to the idea that your imagination of what a sound can be impacts how the note will exit your instrument and enter the room. “Whatever your vision is, it will affect the sound in a significant way,” he told Rewire Festival in 2022. “You can imagine where the sound reaches in the venue — you can even picture it going beyond the venue and reach the whole city.” In listening to MMM, it’s easy to feel that sprawl, that endlessness determined by meticulous details within.
With MMM, he synthesizes these ideas into concise vignettes, bridging his pipe organ with electronics and exploring his own vocalizations. Yet Fujita’s music is deceptively minimalist. At the surface, “MMM 1” is so still it is nearly imperceptible, just adding a little bit of color to the atmosphere, but it’s packed with layers of glistening organ, gradually expanding and fading as they intertwine and come undone. Though his pulses remain deliberate, his rhythms occasionally speed up and then slow down again; while the piece is generally soft, it plunges deeper and deeper, adding more bass notes and crunchy harmonies with each cyclic motion. He leaves room for mystery and for contradiction: His music is both soft and biting, mysterious and plainspoken. And then, with “MMM 2,” he transfers his flexible rhythms to his own voice, interweaving layers of vocalizations into an intricate web of notes. It feels like the opposite version of his pipe organ drone—yet it lives as another contrast in which to sit and to think.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Fujita’s music is its desire to play with time at both a micro and macro level. If I dissect any given minute of one of the three tracks on MMM, I can find a few different patterns, each interwoven into a countable piece of music; if I close my eyes and listen to it as it washes over me I feel those vibrations in one fell swoop. Rhythm drives Fujita’s work, yet it feels as if it could be washed away with a strong gust of wind, left scattered and floating to some unknown destination. No matter how much drone can gesture towards some great expanse, it is bound by time—so why not try to tear the walls down? Fujita reminds us that there has to be something worth seeing on the other side.