Flora by Hiroshi Yoshimura

Flora is an album that is listened to perpetually,
Passed on from one listener to another,
And the charm of the sound- and music-loving figure 
known as Hiroshi Yoshimura,
Just might come drifting through.
Like the scent of a small flower.
—Junichi Konuma

Announcing the worldwide reissue of Flora, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s underrated work originally recorded and completed in 1987 and first released on CD in 2006, three years after his passing in 2003.

Flora is chronologically and stylistically a follow-up to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s acclaimed 1986 works Green and Surround, wherein Yoshimura continues to play with the ambience of sound and the sound of ambience, underscoring his mastery in the field of environmental music. Listening to Flora is like taking a stroll in a park, absorbing the colors and textures of the natural environment—flowers, insects, the swaying of the leaves—as Yoshimura often did at his beloved Edo-era park near his home in Tokyo. As Junichi Konuma describes in his liner notes, Yoshimura’s music “only begins to emerge as it exists at the intersection of passive and active.” Yoshimura's approach to sound and melody invites the listener to hear the intricacies of the music with intent, while simultaneously allowing the aural textures to exist as part of the background of our everyday life.

This reissue marks the first time the album will be available on vinyl (2LP, 45 rpm) and cassette, and includes liner notes written by music scholar Junichi Konuma and remastered audio by Grammy-nominated engineer John Baldwin. Reissue design and layout was handled by Tiffanie Tran. 

Vinyl, CD, Cassette, and Digital pre-orders are now open. In addition to black vinyl, exclusive color vinyl variants are available from Temporal Drift’s Bandcamp ("Evening Primrose"), Light In The Attic ("Sky"), Disk Union ("Asagao"), HHV ("Daisy"), and Liminal Music ("Clover"). Street date is the first day of spring: March 20, 2025.

Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940-2003), unknown outside Japan in his lifetime, has emerged as a celebrated pioneer of ambient music. His recognition surged with the 2017 reissue of Music For Nine Post Cards and his inclusion on the Grammy-nominated Kankyō Ongaku. Reissues of GREEN and SURROUND, with a growing internet following, have sparked renewed interest in his catalog.