Out of the Blue
"Out of the Blue" is Tomo-Nakaguchi’s third album on Audiobulb and marks a significant evolution in his sonic exploration. Meticulously crafting intricate soundscapes from a vast array of audio elements, this album showcases a new level of complexity and beauty. Ranging from serene ambient sounds to aggressive noise, the album takes listeners on an unpredictable sonic journey. With its rapid shifts and layered textures, each track feels like a rollercoaster ride through sound. The intricate layering of sounds creates a sense of floating through a cosmic expanse.
- Mastered by Masahiro Kawano
- Cover Art: Sue Z Smith
Tracklisting:
- Emit
- Indigo Line
- Ice On Glass
- Tidal Breaking
- Cyan
- Filament
- Moon Gazing
- Warm Snow
- Sine From The Past
- Blooms
Tomo-Nakaguchi
Tomo-Nakaguchi is musician / sound artist living in Yokohama, Japan. He is a member of experimental rock band "1769" and multimedia group "skyward photo film". His work creates dreamy and warm texture use layers of modulated acoustic / electric guitar, sampler, broken tape machine, field recordings and many instruments sound.
Reviews
Chain D.L.K.Some albums come knocking politely on your door. "Out of the Blue" instead drifts in through the cracks in your windows, hums from the floorboards, and coils quietly around your ankles like mist. Yokohama-based sound artist Tomo Nakaguchi, a longtime dream-shaper for Audiobulb, delivers his third solo voyage with the grace of a tightrope walker balancing on filaments of mist and broken tape.
Known for his shimmering guitar manipulations and collage work both solo and with the experimental band 1769, Nakaguchi here seems less interested in making tracks and more in crafting weather patterns. "Out of the Blue" is a stormfront stitched together from warped cassette ghosts, glassy synths, and textures that feel hand-sanded by the artist himself - only occasionally do you hear something as traditional as a note.
The journey is one of constant, subtle motion. "Emit" sets the tone, like radio signals captured from a distant memory, while "Tidal Breaking" feels like a miniature ocean folding into itself in slow time. "Filament" and "Warm Snow" could almost be lullabies if lullabies were meant to prepare you for the dissolution of the ego. Tracks like "Ice On Glass" and "Cyan" come at you sideways: delicate, yes, but with an undercurrent of anxiety, like watching snow melt too fast under an unnatural sun.
What’s especially enchanting (and a little hilarious, if you imagine the process) is the idea that behind these celestial textures are very earthbound materials: a battered sampler, a malfunctioning tape deck, a few guitars that probably sigh when picked up. Nakaguchi treats these humble tools as if they were sacred artifacts, finding in their fractures a secret warmth that digital perfection could never touch.
There’s an implicit poetry to the album’s sudden shifts - a feeling that life, like sound, is an endless series of minute accidents adding up to something beautiful if you know how to listen sideways. It’s not an easy record: the emotional climate changes without warning, from tender ambient sweeps to passages that bristle with subtle tension. But this unpredictability feels honest, like weather patterns or memory flashes.
Mastered with sensitivity by Masahiro Kawano, and graced with ethereal artwork by Sue Z Smith, "Out of the Blue" invites you to float without anchors - but don't worry: Nakaguchi is a careful navigator through the mist. You won’t drown; you’ll drift, maybe even bloom a little yourself.
Recommended for fans of fragile ambient ecosystems, lo-fi dreamers, and anyone who’s ever wondered what nostalgia would sound like if it lived inside a snow globe.
Original > HERE
Solenopole
A shimmer, barely a breath. A blue glow emerging from the depths of silence. This is how Out of the Blue , Tomo Nakaguchi's latest album, invites itself to our ears—like an unexpected natural phenomenon, a shimmer emerging between the known and the invisible.
In his intimate Yokohama laboratory, Nakaguchi continues to hone his craft of the unreal. Coming from a Japanese tradition where contemplating the ephemeral becomes an artistic gesture, he sculpts soundscapes that oscillate between pure reverie and celestial chaos. With this third opus on Audiobulb, the musician refines his language of field recordings, modulated guitars, ethereal synthesizers, and infinite loops. But it's no longer just about textures: Out of the Blue offers a true emotional journey, a journey through the looking glass where each note is a shooting star to be captured before it fades.
From Emit , the first track, the ear is caught in a slow twist of reality: breath sounds, saturated grains, micro-cascades of frequencies… We advance blindly, barefoot on a carpet of shadows. Indigo Line and Ice On Glass continue this subtle weaving, where sounds glide like algae under an oily sea. Here, the universe is not mapped: it is felt , intimately. The impression is that of listening to a broken shell that one would hold against one's ear - listening, behind the crash of the past, to the rumor of a still undecided future. Tidal Breaking and Cyan burst out small controlled cataclysms. Tomo Nakaguchi does not seek blissful tranquility; he dares dissonance, rupture, the accident that makes one shiver. His music is alive because it breathes, gasps, sometimes falls - only to rise again, luminous, in Filament or Moon Gazing , true silver swings between sky and sea.
More than a color, blue becomes a language here. It is the blue of twilight that we look at without really wanting to understand. The blue of the memory of water, glass, snow — a fluid, elusive blue, to which Tomo Nakaguchi gives a palpable density. The listener floats in this sound material as if in a semi-waking dream, crossing the last tracks ( Warm Snow , Sine From The Past , Blooms ) as if crossing the diaphanous curtains of another world.
The long shadow of his previous album, The Long Night in Winter Light (2023), is never far away. Here we find the same secret dialogue with nature, but where the motionless and silent snow gives way to a more changeable, more untamed material. The beauty of the world, always threatened by crumbling, blooms under Nakaguchi's fingers in fragile sonic bouquets, offered up to the ephemeral. Where so many electronic albums seek perfect control, Out of the Blue cultivates precious imperfection: a squeaking guitar, a crackling recording, a synth that flickers like a firefly. Every detail seems to carry the memory of a real moment—a crunch of footsteps on snow, a warm wind at dusk.
Listening to Tomo Nakaguchi means accepting the loss of one's bearings. It means letting oneself be submerged by emotional tides, losing oneself only to be better found again by music that illuminates, with a pure blue, our own dark areas. Ultimately, this album is a poetic drift off the tangible world, a reverie offered to those who still know how to listen to the invisible.
Original > HERE
African Paper
n Kürze erscheint mit “Out Of The Blue” das neue digitale Album des japanischen Musikers und Klangkünstlers Tomo-Nakaguchi bei Audiobulb. In seiner dritten Veröffentlichung bei dem Label vertieft Nakaguchi seinen vielschichtigen Ansatz zwischen songhaft eingefärbten Experimenten, akustischer Texturarbeit und elektroakustischer Klangkomposition. Der in Yokohama lebende Künstler, verbindet auf dem neuen Album gezielt bearbeitete Gitarrenschichten mit Sampler, Field Recordings, manipulierten
Tonbandgeräten und einer Vielzahl akustischer Instrumente. Entstanden sind Stücke, die oft zurückgenommen und introspektiv wirken, sich langsam entfalten und in Teilen durch eine dröhnende Schichtung eine subtile Dichte gewinnen. Sanfte, manchmal loungeartige Pianopassagen treffen auf heitere Vogelstimmen, hinter denen es bereits leise rauscht und kratzt. Diese atmosphärischen Elemente werden von akustischen Sounds durchzogen, was dem Ganzen einen organisch-verspielten Charakter gibt.
Audiobulb beschreibt das Album als einen neuen Höhepunkt in Nakaguchis klanglicher Entwicklung: “Out of the Blue” is Tomo-Nakaguchi’s third album on Audiobulb and marks a significant evolution in his sonic exploration. Meticulously crafting intricate soundscapes from a vast array of audio elements, this album showcases a new level of complexity and beauty. Die Spannweite reicht dabei von ruhiger Ambient-Ästhetik bis zu geräuschhaften Verdichtungen – stets geprägt von fein geschichteten Ebenen und überraschenden Wechseln.
Original > HERE