Credo by Marihiko Hara

I first came across Marihiko Hara’s work in 2007, with his ‘Cesura’ release on the excellent Italian net-label – Zymogen. It really drew me in more than most other work that was doing the rounds at the same time. It had the sort of organic details and attention to beautiful subtle developments that I had only really heard in offthesky and Nicolas Bernier before (both label mates on Zymogen I should add). It became my soundtrack to that year and an album I returned to almost daily during the winter months. After this I followed Marihiko’s work carefully, from his rather fantastic 2009 ‘Icon’ release on Cotton Goods to his recent ‘Prosa’ collaboration with Tomas Phillips on Tench Records.

I’m not entirely sure when we first got in touch or who instigated it, but its been a few years now and seeing Marihiko’s evolution and careful development has been a joy to behold. He then completely flummoxed me when asking if I would consider releasing a heavily beat-led record. My only prerequisite was that the beats were made organically, not just some obvious drum machine or sample. Marihiko’s request came at a time when both Ben and myself really wanted Home Normal to push on from its comfortable surroundings that so many labels, artists and possibly listeners for that matter, wish to reside – and keep things evolving, changing and as such, more meaningful for us.

After averaging 10 or so drone demos a day at the time, the initial mixes for Credo were sent. I was in England in this period with Ben, tying up the latest Home Normal work. I recall that we were actually driving to pick up packing materials and decided to make it a demo listening time and that we would do ‘blind’ listens. At some point in the journey, Credo was put on and the car journey ended up being far longer as we wanted to do repeat listens. Amongst excited expressions over just how much we loved the record, was a mutual agreement that this was exactly the kind of music we wanted to put out, and exactly the kind of music which needed to be heard by one of the most talented young producers around today.

Human music by humans for humans.
Maybe for animals as well.

Currently based in Brighton (UK), we were founded in Tokyo (JP) in 2009. We are dedicated to releasing small physical editions of music by a family of talented ambient composers.

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