Listen to Satomimagae’s eerie and intimate new album Hanazono

Satomi Magae first became interested in the guitar in middle school, when she started writing songs in response to the blues records her father had brought from the U.S. to their home in Tokyo. And there is a sense listening to her first three albums as Satomimagae — 2012’s awa, 2014’s koko, and 2017’s kemri — that the 32-year-old singer-songwriter studied her instrument with an inexhaustible curiosity, apparently fascinated by the environments she could render vivid with little more than an acoustic guitar and some disorienting lo-fi vocal effects. What’s clear on her fourth album, Hanazono, premiering in full at the foot of the page ahead of its release tomorrow via RVNG Intl. and Guruguru Brain, is that Satomimagae is now completely at home in the world she’s built, performing these unearthly folk songs so quietly that it’s often hard to figure out whether she’s singing in Japanese or English at any given moment beneath the crackles and gusts of white noise.

Hanazono, which translates from Japanese as “flower garden,” was co-produced and partly mixed by Hideki Urawa, who was behind the desk for Tokyo psych titans Kikagaku Moyo’s 2017 EP Stone Garden. Urawa’s embellishments do make the record sound fuller in places, a little more rounded and sprawling when the echoes of guitar start to multiply, but the real strength here lies in Satomimagae’s songs. One of the record’s most striking moments is “Hokou,” on which Satomi sings as though she’s whispering with the microphone a millimeter from her mouth and her lone guitar plays no more than two notes at a time. It’s not the only moment on Hanazono that might inspire favorable comparisons to Liz Harris’s Grouper; these songs are intimate and eerie, like folk tune set to wax a century ago and untouched ever since.

Listen to Hanazono below and pre-order the album here.