7FO's hypnotic 'Music for Himitsu' embraces the wonders of nature

Back in 2014, Osaka musician 7FO (pronounced “nana-eff-oh”), who doesn’t disclose his real name for privacy reasons, likely didn’t think that the music he was making for an art exhibition that year would see a public release in 2022. But that’s where Berlin label Metron Records comes in.

It’s not the first re-release that the boutique label has offered up, having tracked down pianist (and now chocolatiere) Yumiko Morioka to provide a new home in 2020 for her first and only album, “Resonance,” which was released back in 1987. Nor is it their first 7FO release; the label began with his “Moment (Selected Works 2012-2017)” in 2018, and for the label’s 10th album, he has appeared again. This time it’s “Music for Himitsu.”

The exhibition in question, Himitsu — put on by an eponymous, temporary collective of artists — took place at Galerie6c in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture. Its members, all hailing from Osaka, were ceramic artist Shiori Nishino, photographer Hiroshi Nakamura and landscape gardener Takashi Torigoe. For the show, each discipline represented a part of the elemental trio of earth (for ceramics), light (photography) and water (plants and gardening), all mixing and merging to show both the harmony and discord of nature.

7FO was put on soundtrack duties. The piece — a concerto of found sounds, guitar loops and intricate synthetic details — ran for about 51 minutes and was played on loop for the duration of the exhibition. On one occasion, he showed up to play the piece live.

Originally, his soundtrack for the Himitsu exhibition was recorded onto an old cassette — specifically, a mixtape of 1990s pop hits that he found in a music shop in Nishinari Ward, Osaka. Metron Records has taken this physical sonic artifact and turned it into a proper release in the form of “Music for Himitsu”; remastered, split into unnamed tracks and released digitally and on a limited run of vinyl pressings.

Himitsu (secret) just about describes the nature of the music, which was intended as a backdrop for the exhibition but not one that would fade into the background completely. Instead, it is secret, mysterious, rather than obscured by space or anonymous ambience. It is both unheard and needling its way into your brain.

“Music for Himitsu” starts hypnotically, actively embracing repetition in a skirl of scratchy guitar and unplaceable noises, some of which sound like field recordings of birdsong, though distorted beyond instant recognition. Much like the crackle of frogs croaking at the end of “Part 3,” this is captured sound refracted through the lens of the elements was purported to be at the heart of the exhibition.

This slow, spacious track introduces an element of cyclical jamming to the proceedings, what with its inebriated, sun-warped jangle. It’s the sort of thing someone might strum on a guitar endlessly while sitting on the side of their bed after inhaling something illegal (or legal, depending on your location).

Similarly, “Part 5” is a cocktail of cricket psychedelia and Health-esque guitar noise, all interspersed with bubblings and frenetic reverse sounds. There’s a strange stately feel to this one, its regulated reduplicated phrases contrasting with, and complementing, the slightly unhinged, destructed audio.

There’s a sci-fi feel to “Part 6,” which sounds like something from Earthbound — a 1994 game about an alien invasion for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System whose music reflected the weirdness of the situation: children battling off extraterrestrial robots, brainwashed humans and supernatural monsters.

This irregularly blooping, biomechanical track seamlessly winds its way into “Part 7,” whose sound is more cosmic: looking up at the stars in wonder rather than worrying about what has come from the stars to conquer your planet. The space involved, and the giddying delay on its glistening sounds, gives this track a woozy, intoxicated feeling.

But it isn’t all guitar loops and delay. “Part 4,” easily the simplest-sounding and possibly the most emotive of the eight parts, hums with a warm, considered drone, punctuated in its middle by the sounds of a child running around, squealing happily. It’s a disarming moment: every other sound on the album has been distorted, either in blinding light, or beneath rippling water, or aged in the ancient earth, while this field recording — a moment of purity and joy — remains unchanged. It perhaps represents a desire to be apart from nature, or protected from it, though we are at all times hemmed in by it.

The album closer, “Part 8” — a sparkling, heaven-bound morsel sounding like something from Yasuaki Shimizu’s “Music for Commercials” — ends with the same crushed, gloopy yet spiky birdsong sounds with which “Music for Himitsu” began. It neatly bookends this ouroboros of an album, showcasing its original intention as a singular piece of music to be played on loop, with no particular place to begin and no natural end.