In my experience of discovering house music on YouTube the channel CMYK has been a central fixture, and one of my favorite discoveries is the music of So Inagawa. Selfless State is a track which I come back to again and again. The track has a kind of calm, propulsive energy and open feeling of space that is a mood I love for when I’m working. I listen to this a ton when I’m writing and programming in the morning, two moods which are quite similar. I want something which is instrumental, interesting to listen to but not attention grabbing and with a certain degree of energy to it. I listen to a lot of pure ambient music as well but in the morning after I drink my coffee and sit down to work I often am not in the mood for anything that is too placid. I want something with some momentum.
Inagawa’s music sits beautifully in that pocket, and it’s also just clearly very lovingly crafted with a high degree of refinement and confidence. For me it fits in the category of sort of minimal ‘clean design music’ that I particularly enjoy. It’s possible to apprehend the piece in it’s parts and appreciate it’s construction out of carefully crafted loops and deliberate progression, without flashy moments or hand waving. In an interview for Resident Advisor collaborator and label partner in Cabaret Records DJ Masda writes “We like this hypnotic lock. In Japanese we call it hame.” This feeling of hypnotic lock, perhaps comparable to the often discussed flow concept in game design is one of the things I love about Inagawa’s music: the feeling of being engaged with a piece of music but not overwhelmed by it, a kind of attentive dance between progression and stasis. It’s funny to me because in the past I think on a superficial level I would have hated Inagawa’s music and called it ‘coffee table music’ because of it’s understated and elegant aesthetics. During that phase of my musical interest I was only drawn to music with a ton of energy and attitude, either aggression or brash weirdness. I suppose part of maturing is the rounding of these edges and laughing as you become that thing you might have previously despised.
