Summer Dream

Hiroshi Watanabe started releasing music as kaito in 2001, via legendary German label Kompakt. He’s tended to split his music as kaito into two complementary elements: billowing, lustrous trance, and its beatless, more understated ambient counterpart. While he’s drifted away from the Kompakt mothership, instead releasing music via his own Cosmic Signatures imprint, relatively little has changed. Summer Dream is an ambient set; the melodies here feel a little more Berlin School in their approach, with a more cinematic heft than earlier Kaito. But everything’s still miasmic and dreamy, as though patch bays and modular synths are drifting across icy tundra and then through dense fog.