Continuous Performance No. 3 - 24.3.1977

Japanese kankyō ongaku (environmental music) has long been understood to be a natural evolution from fluxus. It’s a style of ambient music defined by its connection to the spaces in which it’s meant to be played, shaped by the happening-based performance art of 1960s avant-garde. The thread connecting both movements is the influence of Erik Satie, the 19th-century composer who arguably first conceptualized ambient music. Continuous Performance No. 3 is the perfect missing link to prove the theory. Led by fluxus composer Takehisa Kosugi, an ensemble featuring Akio Suzuki, Riri Shimada, and a young Hiroshi Yoshimura – the veritable godfather of kankyō ongaku – performs a mind-bending rendition of Satie’s Sports et divertissements augmented with electronics, a physical performance element, and what the back label calls “environmental sound.” Side A is an experimental work that hardly qualifies as ambient music, but it shows that Yoshimura was thinking about music as a function of physical space even before he was composing music to be played in designer homes or department stores. And to strengthen the connection even more: the B side is simply a field recording collected by a river.