Sven Wunder - Wabi Sabi (2020 Swedish Piano Piano Vinyl LP)

Sven Wunder - Wabi Sabi | Vinyl LP - 2020 Swedish Piano Piano Records Repress (PP1002)

• Sven Wunder's second album, following the Anatolian-influenced debut Eastern Flowers (2019): eleven instrumentals built around Japanese aesthetics, using Western concert flute to evoke the shakuhachi, guzheng (Chinese zither), Moog synthesizer, Wurlitzer electric piano and electric bass
• One of the standout contemporary jazz records of 2020, crossing library music, jazz-funk and East Asian folk sounds in a way that draws comparisons to Hozan Yamamoto, Dorothy Ashby, David Axelrod and Italian library music of the 1970s
• "Hanami" from this album was reworked by Detroit rapper Danny Brown on his 2023 Warp Records album Quaranta, one marker of how widely this record circulated through both jazz and hip-hop collector circles

Joel Danell is a Stockholm-based composer of film and TV scores, son of Swedish jazz drummer Nils Danell, and the person behind the Sven Wunder project, which he runs with label partner John Henriksson on their Piano Piano Records imprint. When Wabi Sabi was released in June 2020 his identity was not publicly known; the record sold through word of mouth and through the support of Mr Bongo in the UK, who had already championed the Turkish and Anatolian-influenced debut Eastern Flowers (2019) and co-released 7"s from both records. Wabi Sabi extends the same methodology into Japanese aesthetics and East Asian sound: Danell uses the Western concert flute throughout to invoke the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute associated with the Edo period, alongside the guzheng (a Chinese zither with over two thousand years of history), Moog synthesizer, Wurlitzer electric piano, strings and electric bass. The reference points cited by Mr Bongo and critics include shakuhachi jazz masters Hozan Yamamoto and the koto players Tadao and Kazue Sawai, as well as Dorothy Ashby and David Axelrod for the string and harp arrangements on the more languid tracks.

The eleven pieces across the two sides take their titles from Japanese concepts and natural phenomena: yūgen (a sense of profound, mysterious beauty), shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), hanami (cherry blossom viewing), komorebi (the quality of sunlight filtering through leaves), kachōfūgetsu (the appreciation of nature through flowers, birds, wind and moon), onsen (hot spring). The framework, as the label describes it, is wabi-sabi itself: the Japanese aesthetic of imperfection, transience and incompleteness, applied here to texture, arrangement and the deliberate quality of the recording. The visual reference is Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock print tradition of the Edo period. Whether you come to this from jazz, library music, crate-digging hip-hop or Japanese folk music, the record holds together as a unified statement. "Hanami" was reworked by Detroit rapper Danny Brown for his 2023 Warp Records album Quaranta, placing it in a different context without diminishing it in the original. This is the second edition repress on PP1002, identifiable by the Swedish Arts Council credit on the rear sleeve.