About

maya ongaku has always been searching for what exists just beyond the edge of perception. Since forming in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima, the trio has followed a path guided less by intention than intuition, allowing songs, ideas, and experiences to emerge through a process they describe as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), spontaneous occurrence. Nothing Space Music is the deepest expression of that philosophy to date.

Written in the aftermath of several years of international touring, the album emerged from a growing desire to reconnect with silence. As stages became larger and the world around them moved faster, the band found themselves drawn toward the quieter spaces beneath it all. What began as a reflection on stillness & silence eventually expanded into the idea of "Nothing Space". To realise the album, maya ongaku created an entirely new environment for themselves. Near a seaside shrine in their hometown, the trio transformed a large soundproof building into Nothing Space Studio, a space built specifically around the needs of this record.

Nothing Space Music: a meditation on presence, perception, and the possibility of rediscovering the world through attentive listening. — (via Label)

—

Japanese ambient psychedelia trio maya ongaku was born during jam sessions and vintage shop hangs in the seaside towns abutting Enoshima, an island 50 kilometers south of Tokyo. Their name is a combination of the Sanskrit word “maya” and Fluxus-affiliated noise group Group Ongaku;  maya ongaku’s sound polymerizes a potpourri of influences befitting their name, from Happy End to Ariel Kalma to Pharaoh Sanders. Along with artists like Takuro Okada and their Guruguru Brain, maya ongaku have been part of a new wave of psychedelic artists finding spirits in the details. Returning to the quiet after a buzzy international tour last summer, the band bought an old building in town, did a full gut renovation, and transformed it into Nothing Space Studio, where they recorded their latest album, Nothing Space Sounds.

Their debut Approach to Anima featured laid-back, sandblasted melodies led by Shoei Ikeda’s earthy sax and Tsutomu Sonoda’s guitar, backed by bass grooves from Ryota Takano, all decorated with a rattling assortment of vibraslaps and a djembe to fill a quieter niche within the rest of the Guruguru Brain catalog. Their Electronic Phantoms EP followed, pivoting to a dancier sound centered around Moog analog synths and a Roland TR-8S while maintaining their echoey psychedelic embellishments.

Nothing Space Music lands somewhere in between. They’ve tightened up their sprawling, improvisational songwriting into more digestible pop nuggets that still open up into endless psychic worlds. After all, the concept of maya, as Sonoda has it, refers to the world of experience outside of direct perception: the images beyond the frame, the sounds that remain uncaptured. You can hear this in the subtle polymetric overlap of the ascending synth on “Hisoku Blue”; or the wail of waterphones (built by sculptor Seiji Iida) that drift in and out of the more traditional folk pop rhythmic and harmonic structures throughout the record. As in their earlier compositions, the band ambles at a leisurely tempo, painting in endless detail between the beats.

The band has always avoided the higher, harsher frequencies, yet Nothing Space Music feels like their floatiest, fluffiest work yet, owing to the ’80s schmaltz of Sonoda’s Juno-6. Combined with the intimacy of their new studio space and incorporation of more neutral, woody percussion sounds, the overall result is a more abstract soundscape whose textural cues don’t connect to any single global locale. It’s familiar, yet not quite—the gently sloping melodic contour of Ikeda’s Rhodes on “Flowing” almost sounds like Satie’s Gymnopedie no. 1, but then meanders into the background to make room for Sonoda’s soft double-tracked vocals. With Nothing Space Sound, maya ongaku has once again found new ways to gesture at more with less. — (via Bandcamp)

↓
Label: Guruguru Brain
Format: Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition
Released: 2026
Genre: Electronic
Style: Downtempo

File under: Japanese Electronic 
⦿