In Search of Sounds for a New Home

Last time, I wrote about wooden houses, taiko drums, and recorders: wood struck, wood breathed through, and eventually wood lived with. Once I actually began spending more time in a timber-filled space, though, I started noticing something else. The room itself seemed to make me think more carefully about sound. Sitting on a wooden floor with music playing nearby, familiar tracks can somehow feel slightly different. A home, perhaps, becomes yours not only through furniture and light, but through whatever sounds are allowed to settle into it.

My playlists are not particularly disciplined. Some days call for jazz, acoustic music, or bossa nova. Other days require game soundtracks to get chores moving, anime songs for a sudden burst of energy, or city pop for reasons I have never fully understood. Looking at the list, I am beginning to suspect that I am not really searching for “music that suits the house.” I am simply collecting music that suits whichever version of myself happens to be there that day.

One artist I have been returning to is singer-songwriter Saya Asakura, whose music draws deeply from Japanese folk traditions. What I enjoy most is the way older melodies are carried into modern arrangements without losing their sense of place. Tracks such as “River Boat Song -Future Trax-” feel new without becoming detached from where they came from. Having spent years around taiko and traditional music, I am drawn to that kind of transformation: not preserving something behind glass, but allowing it to keep moving. There is something about that mixture of old and new that feels particularly at home in a wooden space.

I have also been listening again to recorder player rexage, whose layered performances of game and anime music completely overturn the usual image of the recorder as a school instrument. Multiple parts build into something surprisingly rich and transparent, and the effect is especially satisfying when heard in a quiet room surrounded by wood. Lately I have found myself thinking about houses less as collections of floors, walls, and windows, and more as places where light, texture, smell, and sound gradually overlap. Some days that means music. Some days it means nothing at all. Silence, after all, is a perfectly respectable soundtrack.