Migratory is a masterfully honed album, one that uses restraint and subtlety to illuminate every aspect of landscape, from the surfaces of rushing rivers, to the course and strength of currents that lay beneath.

Moving from Berlin to the village of Kami-cho, Hyōgo, Masayoshi Fujita has realised his dream of living and creating among nature by making a home in the mountains, whittling down the motion and noise around himself to total serenity. The setting is, as one may imagine, inescapably tranquil. Homes are built among the woodland and often with a view overlooking the rise and fall of quietly severe inclines. Here, Fujita has not only made a home but a workspace, renting a former Kindergarten and converting its space into a studio named Kebi Bird from where he has created his latest album, Migratory.

Fujita’s inspiration is clear, exploring the meaning and experience of movement, the journey from one place to another and the environments that befall us. Alongside his own transition from one continent to another, as well as that of his parent’s many years in Thailand, Fujita also considers the travels, roots, and identities of the album’s collaborators, which includes Hatis Noit, Moor Mother, and Swedish shō player, Mattias Hållsten. It is an ambitious subject, one that can explore the personal feeling of closeness or distance to immediate landscape, such as heritage or home, to the vast journey-making of people and animals alike, those who cover immense distances across the planet. It may seem rather odd for Fujita to then compose migratory songs from the stillness of his idyllic mountain studio, and with his signature unhurried vibraphone, but the music created is, even in its most hushed moments, a perfect score for magnitude.

This isn’t to suggest, however, that Fujita has compromised the understated and gentle compositions that he has become renowned for. In fact, I might be inclined to argue that it is with Migratory that his creative voice is at its most refined and confident. Desonata, for example, is inescapably elegant in its simplicity, spending a great deal of its time in the reverberations of struck keys, a quality that aligns with the track’s original title, Resonata. Then there are Blue Rock Thrush and Pale Purple, both of which glide with the pace of a setting sun, unhurriedly pushing the album toward a certain classification of ‘ambient’.

To wholly categorise the album in such a way, however, may not entirely meet a listener’s expectations. There are moments, such as amid the devotional brightness of Our Mother’s Lights, a track featuring the guiding voice of Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, that embrace the more dynamic nature of migration and see Fujita’s percussion drive into a tender flurry. Migratory is an ambient album but, between its fluttering melodies and slow-motion undercurrent, it feels deeply evocative of nature and is perhaps better considered as music of ‘atmosphere’, a descriptor that Fujita has often mentioned striving toward.

Regardless of such minor details, the music Fujita has created from his mountainside space is exceptionally beguiling, and Migratory is a masterfully honed album, one that uses restraint and subtlety to illuminate every aspect of landscape, from the surfaces of rushing rivers, to the course and strength of currents that lay beneath.