INOYAMA LAND - "SWIVA" LP

Lulu's is beyond excited to be offering copies of Swiva; the brand new fourth album from Japanese ambient pioneers Inoyama Land.

In their first completely new work since 1998's Music For Myxomycetes, Swiva is described by the band as a collection of twelve "sound poems" that return to the same reflections of imagined space the band first explored on their 1983 debut; the Haroumi Hosono produced Danzindan-Pojidon.

Working together continuously since their first meeting in 1977, Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita's Inoyama Land project has seen them collaborate on sound design for avant-garde theatre, museum exhibits, architectural firms, and new age "relaxation tapes" amongst countless other small projects and digressions.

Mostly ignored by Western fans and critics of ambient music for decades, the recent (and long deserving) re-appraisal of Japanese Kankyō Ongaku (Environmental Music) by the west has finally seen Inoyama Land, and their contemporaries such as Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada and Toshifumi Hinata, given the credit and respect they had always deserved as pioneers of the genre.

It is within this context that Inoyama Land finally, with Swiva, makes a return to music intended for home listening. Building upon their decades of professional work in the Environmental Music field, Swiva's sparse soundscapes, peppered with the humour and flashes of theatricality that have always set Inoyama Land apart from their contemporaries, create entire worlds within their melodies.

Featuring artwork by world-renowned multimedia artist Osamu Sato (creator of cult classic Playstation game LSD: Dream Emulator, amongst his impressive and expansive oeuvre), Swiva is another important chapter in the history of Inoyama Land, Japanese ambient music, and the ambient genre as a whole.