Tokyo-based artist and award-winning composer Yuma Koda will release his debut full-length album, Amid Kinos, October 2 via Newhere Music, the Tokyo-based label known for releases by Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi, including Ishibashi’s acclaimed soundtrack for Drive My Car.
Built around what Koda calls “imagined nostalgia,” Amid Kinos is a deeply personal exploration of memory, place and experience—and of the ways imagination can sometimes become inseparable from what was actually lived. Rather than simply looking backward, Koda uses sound to examine how memories change, fragment and acquire new meanings over time.
Koda describes the album as a “personal attempt to translate, socialize, and contemporize those feelings through sound,” and its first single, “kopfkino,” offers an evocative introduction to that idea. The title comes from the German compound word combining Kopf (head) and Kino (cinema), referring to the vivid experience of the imagination playing out scenarios, conversations or worries like a movie inside the mind.
“kopfkino” carries a distinctly sentimental quality, drawing on Koda’s reflections on his youth. The recording brings together some of the most notable musicians in Tokyo’s contemporary music scene, including guitarist and producer Takuro Okada, saxophonist Kei Matsumaru, bassist Marty Holoubek and drummer Shun Ishiwaka, all of whom contribute to the album.
Koda expands that circle of collaborators throughout Amid Kinos, bringing in Brooklyn-based guitarist and songwriter Mei Semones, composer and vocalist LUCA, who previously contributed vocals to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async, Julia Shortreed of Black Boboi, Osaka-born and Munich-based drummer Shinya Fukumori, and Yuma Abe of never young beach.
Together, the musicians help create an atmosphere that is quietly cinematic, with ECM-influenced jazz and electroacoustic composition continually flowing into one another. Koda’s piano is not treated as the dominant instrument. Instead, each musician becomes part of a larger sonic environment, with the individual performances woven together alongside field recordings captured in Portugal, Tokyo, Denmark and New York.
Koda uses techniques associated with musique concrète and sound collage to manipulate those recordings and performances, meticulously layering and processing sounds until their original boundaries become difficult to identify. The result is music that seems to exist somewhere between recollection and invention, where time can bend and familiar experiences become increasingly ambiguous.
The concept has roots in Koda’s childhood. He spent much of his early life in an independent movie theater operated by his father, an experience that immersed him in an expansive world of cinema. Later, while studying classical music theory in Italy and Japan, he developed a fascination with jazz and electronic music, while also becoming deeply influenced by the musical philosophy of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.
Those experiences eventually led Koda toward an interdisciplinary career encompassing film, television, fashion and installation work. His credits include the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival-winning score for KONTORA, a Best Original Music nomination at the British Independent Film Awards for The Ceremony, compositions for fashion label HYKE, sound-art installations and television scores created in collaboration with Haruomi Hosono.
The music on Amid Kinos reflects that wide-ranging background without fitting neatly into a single genre. Instead, Koda approaches composition as a form of memory-making, combining acoustic musicianship, electronic processing, field recordings and carefully constructed spaces of silence and atmosphere.
“The nostalgia within me and the confusion surrounding it,” Koda says of the album. “My deep longing for images and language. While being influenced by the friends I've encountered over the past few years, I made this album by carefully considering how to reconcile these elements through my current methods.”
That tension between nostalgia and uncertainty is at the heart of Amid Kinos. Koda isn't attempting to recreate the past so much as understand the emotional traces it leaves behind. His debut becomes a kind of cinematic memory archive—one in which real places, imagined scenes, personal history and borrowed experiences can coexist.
Amid Kinos will be released October 2 via Newhere Music. The 12-track album includes “kopfkino,” “marthe” featuring Shuhei Kato and LUCA, “artemisia” featuring Julia Shortreed, “liquorice” featuring Takuro Okada, “images on loan” featuring Jan Urila Sas and Shun Ishiwaka, and the title track “amid kino[s]” featuring Kei Matsumaru and Shinya Fukumori. The closing track, “ende,” features Mei Semones and Yuma Abe.
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