Flora, the follow-up to Green and Surround, will be released on vinyl for the first time on March 20th via Temporal Drift.

Our friends at Temporal Drift continue to their masterful archival work this time reviving a lesser known release from the catalog of environmental music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura. Flora was originally recorded and completed in 1987 and first released on CD-only in 2006, three years after Yoshimura’s passing in 2003. Copies of Flora have become increasingly difficult to come by in recent years with the price skyrocketing to over $500 alongside the renewed interest in Yoshimura’s calming ambient works.

“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.”

On Friday, March 21st In Sheep’s Clothing and Temporal Drift will present a listening party at the JACCC Japanese garden dedicated to Flora and the works of Hiroshi Yoshimura. Temporal Drift’s Yosuke Kitazawa and Patrick McCarthy will co-host the listening session alongside In Sheep’s Clothing selectors.

Tickets are available now via JACCC: https://jaccc.org/events/hiroshi-yoshimura-floraa-listening-party/