Midori Hirano ~ Soniscope

Soniscope is a rainy day album.  When sun and sand beckon, the music fades into the background; but when one is stuck inside, dreaming of the beach, the sounds surge to the foreground.  Midori Hirano‘s compositions seem simple on the surface

ACL 2020 ~ Top Ten Ambient

A Closer Listen received over 10,000 submissions this year, 7000 of them valid, and we listened to at least a segment of every one.  Now we’ve chosen 70 of them ~ one percent ~ to include in our year-end lists.  The competition has never

Midori Hirano ~ Invisible Island

Invisible Island is a place of comfort without trivialization: a collection of simple songs that invite blissful quietude without any of the hollowness us cynics often see in anything optimistic. Berlin-based, Tokyo-born Midori Hirano instead tells us— through the transcendental language

Midori Hirano ~ Minor Planet

We’ve always had a weakness for Sonic Pieces’ hand-stitched covers, shown below in an image borrowed from Sounds of a Tired City.  Minor Planet contains an circle on the cloth cover to represent its title, but we’re simply going to call