Satoshi Ashikawa's "Still Way" is a shimmering, meditative document of Japanese environmental music — ambient piano and field recordings that feel less like a performance and more like a memory of a quiet afternoon. Essential for fans of Hiroshi Yoshimura or anyone who has ever needed a room to breathe.
In 1982, Satoshi Ashikawa released an album that sounds like the last day of spring. “Still Way” doesn’t begin so much as arrive — a Yamaha grand piano, tracked at Sound City in Tokyo with engineer Hiroshi Osaka, and a cassette recorder left by an open window to capture the rain and distant traffic. The result is music that refuses to perform.
Ashikawa was part of Japan’s Wave Notation series, a small catalog of environmental music released through Better Days that treated composition as a form of architecture. The room was the instrument. The listener’s attention was the voltage. “Still Way” pushes that logic to its quietest extreme — these are pieces that could be mistaken for improvisations, but every note feels chosen with surgical care.
The album’s centerpiece, “River,” unfolds like a shallow stream moving over stones. Ashikawa’s left hand holds a simple fifth interval while his right hand sketches melodic fragments that never resolve. You can hear the splice points in the tape — the edits weren’t hidden, they were left visible like joints in a wooden beam. That honest imperfection is what keeps the record from drifting into wallpaper.
What separates “Still Way” from its Western contemporaries like Harold Budd or Brian Eno is the way Ashikawa treats silence as an active ingredient. There are whole passages where the room itself overtakes the piano — the hum of a refrigerator, the creak of a chair, a bird calling from a tree outside the studio window. Those sounds aren’t accidents. They’re the real composition. The piano is just there to mark time.
Side A ends with “Landscape,” a piece that exists almost entirely in the space between notes. Osaka later recalled that Ashikawa asked the studio’s air conditioning to be left on during the take because “the room sounds better when it’s working to stay comfortable.” That attention to thermal atmosphere tells you everything about the record’s intent.
“Still Way” was never a commercial release in any meaningful sense. It circulated among Japanese architects and interior designers who used it to audition spaces — a testing ground for how sound behaves in a room. But like so much of the kankyō ongaku catalog, it found a second life decades later, passed between ghostly file shares and late-night YouTube uploads. The album has the texture of something that was never fully owned by its creator anyway.
You can hear why it stuck. There’s no drama here, no climax, no key change that announces itself. Just Yamaha 88s, room tone, and the sound of a man listening to the world as much as he’s playing into it.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Cassette recorder by open window captured rain and distant traffic.
- Tape splice points left visible like joints in a wooden beam.
- Room sounds like fridge hum and bird call are the real composition.
- 'River' uses a simple fifth interval with unresolved melodic fragments.
- Ashikawa treated silence as an active ingredient, not absence.
- 'Landscape' exists almost entirely in the space between notes.
What is kankyō ongaku?
It translates roughly to 'environmental music' — a Japanese movement in the late 70s and early 80s that treated composition as a functional element of interior space, often using minimal piano, tape loops, and field recordings. Hiroshi Yoshimura and Satoshi Ashikawa were its key figures.
Is 'Still Way' available on streaming services?
Yes, after the 2020 reissue by WRWTFWW Records, the album was added to most major streaming platforms including Apple Music, Spotify, and Qobuz.
What other albums are similar to 'Still Way'?
Start with Hiroshi Yoshimura's 'Green' and 'Music for Nine Post Cards', then try Inoyama Land's 'Danse des Fleurs'. All three share the same quiet, open-air piano sound and were released on the Better Days label.
Further Reading