afterlife

Japanese trance-ambient producer Hiroshi Watanabe (aka kaito) has hit a purple patch, creatively speaking, of late: afterlife is his third album of 2022 and it extends the rich seam of lush driftworks he’s been exploring with Silent World and Summer Dream. Indeed, he’s framed it as a continuation of the latter, which you can certainly hear in its mood — positive, brimming with pleasure, but tinged with moist melancholy. He’s never been shy of textural overload but the flooding of the senses that occurs in “Modulation Sky” is particularly overwhelming; the two versions of “Moonlight Dance” are deliciously dreamy. If you’re thinking there’s a lot of ambient music about these days, you’d be right, but kaito’s music is much richer with emotion, and there’s no soporific New Age boredom here — just endless pleasure.