At the midpoint of Tomotsugu Nakamura’s Antenna, a tiny finch appears, in one of the most captivating and convincing compositions on the Tokyo-based ambient composer’s latest release. The finch’s arrival is short-lived, sadly. The interlude in question, “Finch-2023-07-29”, clocks in at a paltry 44 seconds, though the other eleven cuts on the album are no drawn-out feats either. 

Overall, Antenna’s pacing, sparsely sequences by clicks and cuts, is breezy if somewhat familiar. After our finch sighting, it almost feels like it’s time to hit the dance floor, as the general mood of the album’s second half is downright mirthful. But there is too little carryover, durationally speaking anyway, for things to blossom into full-on beats. Instead, Nakamura’s microtonality – the fertile ground on which Antenna is sowed – requires an economy of listening predicated on close attention. Lose focus, and the whole structure becomes a flimsy architecture of those ubiquitous bleeps.

The smallness of Nakamura’s musical gestures makes the deliberate choice of limiting each composition’s length all the more poignant. There is no greater whole on Antenna to which its constituent parts ultimately belong, no background matrix of predetermined contrasts that ever get the opportunity to swallow these tiny little birds, and flowers (“Heliotrope-2023-07-29” is another favourite of mine) before they move to the next track, their only vestige the subtle attenuation of careful, conscious listening. Sonically, there is little here to reinvent the softer reaches of the ambient spectrum, but to measure the merits of Antenna against such criteria would run the risk of scaling up, zooming out, when the current view is just fine as is. Somewhere, Bruno Latour is smiling.

A release for fans of microtonal ambient work, with emphasis on the “micro”. Highly recommended!