Album:Water in Time and Space

Water in Time and Space (時空の水) is Susumu Hirasawa's first solo album. It is the first part of a trilogy, with The Ghost in Science being the second, and Virtual Rabbit being the third, that explores reality, religion, science and dreams.

Background
At the end of P-Model's 28 December 1988 show at Shibuya Club Quattro, Susumu Hirasawa announced that the band was "entering cold sleep in preparation for the coming ice age", effectively signalling its disbandment. The decision came following lengthy production battles with One Pattern and Monster that had drained the entire group, which brought Hirasawa to the realization that his approach since 1983 had created unworkable long-term problems. He felt that P-Model had effectively stopped being a band when its only other major creative force, Yasumi Tanaka, left; and that he had only continued it out of misplaced emotional attachment in a period of poor mental health. By that point, he'd spent months making arrangements for the making of his first solo album (such as the recording schedule) in secret from the other members.

While Monster was still in production, Hirasawa maintained several side projects that went beyond the scope of P-Model. On the music side, he made Shun 4 and the first tracks of How About Fuko; both ventures saw him experimenting with new forms of sampling and layering tracks. Elsewhere, he began practicing with the Amiga's computer graphic programs, eventually establishing the private label "Photon" to distribute tapes of his CG work through mail order. His first release, Susumu Hirasawa's CG New Year's Card, served both as a demonstration of his new skill and a confirmation of his then-upcoming solo career.

Following the announcement of P-Model's separation, Hirasawa took to untying his other outlets from the band: On 1 March his management office changed its name from "Model House" to "Octave", and the official fanclub followed suit a month after the album's release, from "Moire Club" to "Hirasawa Bypass". In 4 April, Hirasawa signed a contract with Polydor and started recording the album in their studios, taking only a month to do so. His first solo tour took place one month after finishing the album.

Composition
To prepare for solo work, Hirasawa recorded Mandrake's "Happening by the Windowsill" on his own. The sound he developed was noted as a return to prog-like sounds and melodies. At one point, to find out appropriate arrangements, he listened to various pieces for their writing craft, something outside of his pop/rock past. Songwriting sessions took place in the United States of Kameari, within a 4½ tatami mat room: music composition was made with 2 synthesizers and a sequencer, while lyrics were written on a 50 cm² table. Before communicating his intention to end P-Model to the other members, Hirasawa was being taken over by his new material throughout mid-late 1988, experiencing a feeling he hadn't had since around the time of making In a Model Room. He also felt that the situation around him (of "being released from a variety of things"), and the sense of playfulness with which he worked, were similar to the conditions around the making of Scuba.

In another similarity to the creation of In a Model Room, Hirasawa had an existing cache of material to work with: three-fifths of Water in Time and Space are effectively self-covers of material he wrote during the two-year void of major releases that preceded it. He could not afford to discard three Monster songs ("Coyote", "The Workshop is Taboo", "Dune") and salvaged them for the album instead. Two songs from independent self-recorded cassette only releases (Scuba's "Frozen Beach" and Charity Original Tape's "Root of Spirit") were also rearranged for the album, with the former being an older piece Hirasawa wanted to do justice to, and the latter being a recent composition that acted as a blueprint for the rest of the tracks' musical style. "Solar Ray" is a reworking of a jingle originally written for a Mizuno commercial.

Over the years, an interest in songwriting grew within Hirasawa, which he couldn't pursue because the development of music centred on sounds over songs was the greatest common divisor among P-Model members. On his own, Hirasawa was able to write material around melodies and many chord progressions, and crafting vocal parts in keys he had never sung in before. Lyrically, the album contains a high amount of love songs ("Dune", "Frozen Beach", "Venus"), something uncommon in Hirasawa's writing before and after its making. The overall mood of the album is light and brisk, another strong contrast with P-Model, whose music often had a nervous energy.

Without P-Model, Hirasawa did not have to think about the appropriateness of the material in a live setting; that, combined with recording facilities that presented no restrictions, meant he was free to create arrangements that fit the image each song went for. As a result, Water in Time and Space features a large variety of styles: Hirasawa names them as "cheap military band" (marked by heavy brass and march rhythms), "elementary school song" (matched to an orchestral, classical arrangement to highlight the songwriting), "Andes-like ones" (performed in a folk style or otherwise), "slow-tempo heavy ones" and "pop numbers". He did not think about rock at all while making the album.

The press release defines the genre as "Isotonic Pop" (アイソトニック・ポップ). Hirasawa, for his part, thought he was establishing a genre within a new value system, which he later defined as reinterpretation of techno-pop. The multitude of styles on display surprised fans, industry journalists and former P-Model members alike.

Theme-wise, besides Hirasawa's long running interest in Jungian psychology, Water in Time and Space is heavily influenced by his dabblings in the new age movement, with a focus on widely disproved pseudoscience and alternative medicine that he believes in. In particular, a book on "holistic health", reporting the experiences of doctors who researched magical practices in folk medicine and visited descendants of the Inca who preserved their traditions, had a huge impact on him, which lead many songs on the album to contain some theming or references to Incan culture. Hirasawa did not start work on the album with a concept in mind, and the final product has no particular total concept, unlike most of Hirasawa's solo output.

Production
With advances in technology, Hirasawa moved away from sound synthesis and towards sound sampling. Water in Time and Space heavily features the Korg M1R workstation sample-based synthesizer, whose expansive, organic-sounding preset palette completely replaces the digital tones from the Casio synths used by the last era of P-Model. Still, some equipment (Hirasawa's trademark Talbo guitars and electronic devices) carried over. Unusual sound collages carry over from One Pattern, but instead of sudden MIDI guitar percussion solos, Hirasawa made rhythmic backings out of found sounds like bird chirping and coin rolling. Though created with heavy use of digital devices, it is one of Hirasawa's least electronic-sounding works, with prominent use of acoustic tones throughout.

The chief engineer for the album was Yoshiaki Kondo, who had earlier worked on Karkador and One Pattern. This would be the first project where Hirasawa received his long-sought services unaltered, as previous productions were subject to disputes with Alfa over Kondo's fitness for the role and undercover re-engineering. Water in Time and Space has a lo-fi sound, not entirely dissimilar from the self-recorded releases some of the material originated from, which became the characteristic sound for the first solo trilogy. Besides the electronics, Hirasawa also performed with plucked string instruments, percussion instruments and, for the first and only time in his life, woodwind instruments. The liner notes give him a blanket "all instruments" credit.

Although he played about 90% of the instruments in the album, only two tracks were performed by Hirasawa completely solo; the rest feature a variety of guest performers: session musicians for parts he couldn't play by himself, a professional symphony arranger and friends and actors from underground new wave scene. Hirasawa felt a kind of satisfaction from their work, as they created unconventional developments and finished their parts in whichever form they preferred. His collaboration with guests here led to the beginning of his solo backing band. For songs that required choral backing, Hirasawa would get whoever was present in the studio and form an impromptu choir.

Hirasawa described the recording process as "mentally easy but physically hard". Since he had to play nearly every instrument on his album, that meant he had no resting time when working on it. Sessions happened concurrently with those for Maximum Kiss by The Groovers, for which Hirasawa was producer, as well as strings and saxophone arranger. His mind managed to handle the busy workload, but it took a toll on his body, to the point of looking "corpse-like" after a month at it. Despite the concerns of the people around him, Hirasawa kept working without changing his routine.

At one point, while Hirasawa recorded at Keystone, he was visited in the studio by a musician he admired, Be-Bop Deluxe/Red Noise guitarist Bill Nelson. Hirasawa has no idea why that happened.

Visuals
The artwork of Water in Time and Space was made by Kiyoshi Inagaki, who had done some graphic work for P-Model and Shun. The art design of the album established some general design characteristics for Hirasawa's solo albums: Water in Time and Space is Hirasawa's first album where a photo of him (with paint splotches on his face) was used for the cover, with the colors reversed into their negatives; and the symbol on the cover is Hirasawa's autograph, which makes various appearances through his works, being particularly prominent in the early stage of his solo career. The art is themed around water imagery. The photographs in the booklet feature Hirasawa wearing a black suit jacket and a gaudily-patterned ascot popping out between the lapels. For his 1989 shows, Hirasawa replicated this look, with exception of the jacket: his touring one had a large black vertical stripe on the middle, black sleeves, two smaller white stripes running between them, instead of being purely black. The shirt used on the album's cover and the ascot on the inner photos/shows mark the only times Hirasawa has worn florally patterned clothing, a mainstay of his day-to-day wardrobe, for his professional work.

Personnel

 * Susumu Hirasawa - vocals, classical guitar, electric guitar, bass, crumhorn (on "Haldyn Hotel"), timpani, percussion, synthesizers, drum machine, sampler, sequencer, Ozonotech Computer ("Say" program - Computer Voice on "Dune"), programming, arrangements, production


 * additional performers
 * Minoru Yoshizawa - crumhorn (credited as "Krumme Horn") on "Haldyn Hotel"
 * Akiro Kamio Arishima, Masahiro Furukawa, Hisayuki Makanae - backing vocals on "Haldyn Hotel"
 * Kazuhide Akimoto (also listed under special thanks as "Akimoto-kun"), Michäel Saturnus - backing vocals on "Haldyn Hotel" and "Coyote"
 * Asuka Kaneko's Section - violins, cellos, violas and double basses on "Root of Spirit"
 * Shingo Tomoda - percussion on "Coyote", drums on "Frozen Beach" and "Venus"
 * Kazumi "KERA" Kobayashi - backing vocals and Coyote Voice on "Coyote"
 * Jun Togawa (courtesy of Teichiku Records) - backing vocals on "The Workshop is Taboo"
 * Kayo Kokubo Matsumoto - acoustic piano on "Water in Time and Space"
 * Tsuneo Imahori - bass on "Skeleton Coast Park"
 * Hiroshi Harada - Min'yō Styled Vocal on "Skeleton Coast Park"


 * technical
 * Yoshiaki Kondo (Gok Sound) - recording & mixing engineer
 * Shinichi Tomita, Nobuhiko Matsufuji, Atsushi Hattori (Mix); Masanori Ihara (Gold Rush Studio); Yoshikatsu Takatori (Sound Inn) - second engineers


 * visuals
 * Kiyoshi Inagaki - art direction
 * Mado & Vincent - photography
 * Akemi Tsujitani, Michiko Aoki - styling
 * Kazunori Yoshida - hair & makeup


 * operations
 * Octave
 * Mitsuo Nagano - artist management
 * Megumi Watase - desk
 * Mitsuru Hirose - publicity coordination
 * Office Moving - concert coordination
 * Polydor Records.
 * Kazuyoshi Aoki - A&R
 * Osamu Takeuchi - assistant


 * Thanks
 * Yasumasa Mishima, Yumiko Ohno, Masaya Abe, Mezame no Sato, Kei Fukuchi, Kazumi Sawaki, AC Unit, Ice Grey, Nobuyoshi Matsubara, Akira Ito, Aria, Casio, Signifie

Project Archetype reissue

 * Osamu Takeuchi (wilsonic), Kasiko Takahasi (FASCINATION) - supervisors
 * Masanori Chinzei - mastering supervisor
 * Universal Music
 * Kenji Yoshino - remastering
 * USM Japan
 * Eiichi Mikami - chief A&R
 * Toru Nagai - A&R
 * Yuko Yamane - A&R desk
 * Koichi Nakagawa - executive producer
 * Masanori Okamura - sales promotion


 * Special Thanks to
 * Susumu Hirasawa & CHAOS UNION

Release history

 * "Haldyn Hotel", "Root of Spirit", "Coyote", "Frozen Beach" and "Venus" are included on the ADVANCED ROCK 3 promotional sampler.
 * "Solar Ray (SPECTRUM 2 TYPE)" is the B-Side to the "World Turbine" single.
 * "Haldyn Hotel [Fractal Terrain Track]" is the B-Side to the "Bandiria Travellers [Physical Navigation Version]" single.
 * "Venus" is included on Detonator Orgun 2; "Water in Time and Space (Full Size)" and "Root of Spirit" are on the Detonator Orgun 3 soundtrack album.
 * "Haldyn Hotel [Fractal Terrain Track]", "Root of Spirit", "Skeleton Coast Park" and "Venus" are included on the Root of Spirit～ESSENCE OF HIRASAWA SOLO WORKS～ compilation.
 * "Haldyn Hotel" (and "Fractal Terrain Track"), "Root of Spirit", "Solar Ray (SPECTRUM 2 TYPE)", "Frozen Beach", "Water in Time and Space (Full Size)" and "Venus" are included on the Archetype | 1989-1995 Polydor years of Hirasawa compilation.