Shinji Wakasa’s “Dawn” is a conceptual ambient music album inspired by the ancient Chinese poem “The Fisherman” and the picture book “Dawn” by Uri Shulevitz, which uses this poem as its original title. In Shulevitz’s picture book, a beautifully evolving world at daybreak is depicted with very beautiful colour usage and minimal words. Wakasa undertook the creation of this album to express the world of this picture book and the original poem through sound.
In producing the music for this album, Wakasa set a very simple rule for himself: to create in the early morning using the clear awareness of the morning, to play what he felt at that moment without denying the first sound, and to build the music like flowing clouds, a concept expressed in Japanese Zen as “flowing clouds and water.”
This approach has successfully imbued the entire album with a sense of freedom and a gradation that transitions from the pitch-black sky gradually illuminated by the sun’s light, turning from blue to green to yellow.
In producing the music for this album, Wakasa set a very simple rule for himself: to create in the early morning using the clear awareness of the morning, to play what he felt at that moment without denying the first sound, and to build the music like flowing clouds, a concept expressed in Japanese Zen as “flowing clouds and water.”
This approach has successfully imbued the entire album with a sense of freedom and a gradation that transitions from the pitch-black sky gradually illuminated by the sun’s light, turning from blue to green to yellow.