RUISKAMER: Masayoshi Fujita / Bertel Schollaert & Hein Devos

In 2020, Masayoshi Fujita traded sweltering Berlin for a new place to live and work in homeland Japan, in the mountains along the coast of Kami-cho, Hyōgo, three hours west of Kyoto. Amid nature, “Migratory” was born, an album on which the composer and producer explores past and future of marimba and vibraphone, in dialogue with synths and various guests with migration stories of their own.

There are contributions from Swedish shō player Mattias Hållsten, whom he welcomed to his home studio in Japan after a brief encounter in Sweden. But also from American poet Moor Mother, who reminds you on “Our Mother's Light” that we are actually all passing through, with an incantatory mantra on a Japanese-African-sounding composition. Fujita senior, Masayoshi's father, who himself lived in Thailand for 15 years, also lends his saxophone to the album, adding a layer of jazz to 3 of the tracks on the record.

All those world travellers notwithstanding, the title does not refer to the migration of people, but to that of migratory birds, always on the move somewhere between Africa, Southeast Asia and Japan. Fujita therefore made the album as a soundtrack to their long journey, imagining how they would hear that music from above. The result is a mesmerising amalgam of sounds where genres and their boundaries become as blurred as those between countries when you fly over them from high above the clouds.