Five Dreams

Five Dreams found Chihei Hatakeyama exploring musical space via what could be called a very long game indeed, with a day’s worth of electric guitar recordings done in 2008 only finally released after extensive reworking and arranging in 2015. But as is the case with Hatakeyama’s work in general, instead of overworked busy sonics, Five Dreams is intensely calming and reflective across its tracks, the whole inspired by Soseki Natsume’s novel Ten Nights of Dreams. “January,” with its buried recurrent melodic hook, and “July” are both especially captivating.