The Habit extends Go Hirano’s quietly singular path through the Japanese underground into a panoramic, deeply personal chapter. For more than thirty years, Hirano has been building a sound world on the margins: small in scale yet immense in atmosphere, unconcerned with virtuoso sheen and devoted instead to the poetry of unguarded moments. Emerging in the 1990s with three albums on the revered PSF Records, he quickly marked himself out as a musician whose sense of melody felt both entrancing and intimate, as if the pieces were being dreamed into the room rather than formally composed. Recorded largely at home or in the field, his work has always preferred the soft grain of lived sound over controlled studio sterility, letting the creak of a chair, the click of a key or the distant rumble of the street become part of the music’s breath.
On The Habit, Hirano gathers recordings that span decades of playing piano and other instruments as part of his daily routine. The core sessions were tracked in 2020 at Pianola Records in Tokyo, but other pieces reach back as far as the late 1980s, when his language was first taking shape. Heard together, these fragments resolve into a remarkably coherent vision: a meditative, melodic practice that has evolved in detail but remained consistent in its devotion to repetition, space and resonance. The title hints at this constancy. Playing is not a special event for Hirano; it is a habit in the best sense, a daily action that quietly structures life, like brewing tea or opening a window to check the weather.
Working with a deliberately restrained palette - piano, pianica, wind chimes, small percussion, synthesizer - Hirano develops simple figures that gently mutate over time. A few spacious piano chords might hang in the air, their decays slowly threaded with soft synthesizer tones; a hushed keyboard melody repeats with tiny shifts in voicing, gradually changing the emotional colour without ever announcing a “development.” Near‑imperceptible rhythmic frameworks arise from the light tap of a drum, the sway of a chime, or the natural pulse of environmental sound filtering into the recording. Tranquil phrases drift and merge with the ambience of the room and the world outside: passing cars blurred by distance, birdsong, the subtle shudder of a building. The effect is less like listening to a track and more like entering a room where music is already happening as part of the air.
This inseparability of music and environment is central to The Habit. Hirano does not treat background noise as interference to be scrubbed out; he invites it in as collaborator. Each piece is inextricable from the space in which it was played: the size and materials of the room, the time of day, the weather outside, the artist’s own movement through domestic routines. What some might call imperfections - a slight mismatch of tempo, the sound of the pedal, a faint hiss - are, for him, pathways to something more alive. They prevent the music from sealing itself off, keeping it porous to the present moment. Across the album, you can feel how this approach transforms modest gestures into something quietly luminous. The pieces shimmer not because they are decorated, but because they are so open to what is around them.
While listeners may hear affinities with figures such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hiroshi Yoshimura or Brian Eno - in the emphasis on gentle repetition, tonal clarity and an almost environmental stillness - Hirano’s commitment to “initial, unadorned expression” sets him apart. He seems less interested in crafting an idealised soundscape than in capturing a first thought before it hardens: the way a melody appears under the hands when you sit down to play without a plan, the way harmony is shaped by whatever else is occupying your attention at that moment. That stance gives The Habit a particular warmth. It feels like an album made for and within a life, rather than a project conceived at a distance from it.
The record’s material realisation deepens that impression without distracting from it. Co‑released with Japanese label Conatala, it is mastered by Makoto Oshiro to preserve the music’s delicate dynamics and ambience. Lacquers cut by Rashad Becker at Clunk Studio in Berlin and pressing at Optimal Media in Germany give the vinyl edition a tangible presence that mirrors the tactility of the recordings themselves. Artwork by Yukiko Ikeda and design by Rob Carmichael (Seen) frame the music with the same understated care that shapes Hirano’s playing, while production support from Peter Kolovos, Conatala and Rie Hirano helps bring decades of scattered recordings into a unified, thoughtfully curated whole.
