Release date: June 27th 2001
Composer: Torn (Masafumi Takada, Shingo Yasumoto)
Catalog number: KICA-5055
Water: For Relaxing Time is one of two soundtracks released for Flower, Sun and Rain. As its title suggests, it is a collection of the more relaxing tracks. It should be noted that even when combining both CDs, many tracks remain unreleased to this day.
The booklet for Water includes a short story called “One Island, One Resort and One More Episode”, which has been translated by PT. A Japanese data analyst is picked up by Rock at the Lospass airport in order to vacation at the Flower, Sun, and Rain hotel. As he relaxes on the beach, he reminisces about his meeting with a musician and their conversation about Ravel’s Boléro.
Art Scans
Track list
One Island, One Resort and One More Episode
~”Flower, Sun, and Rain” Another Episode~
When I landed at the airport after a seven-hour flight, I was approached by a brown-skinned, strangely braided but very polite young local.
The young man was there to pick me up and drive me to the only hotel on the island, “F.S.R.”. After carefully loading my luggage into the trunk, he opened the back seat door and spoke.
“Please get in. Welcome to Lospass.”
Lospass island is not the kind of place you’d find in a brochure for cheap vacations offered by a travel agent.
It’s small enough that you can walk around it in just a few hours, with only one airport and one hotel.
It’s an exclusive resort where celebrities, mostly European, come to enjoy complete privacy.
In Japan, achieving total freedom from mobile phones and the internet is extremely difficult. Hell, it’s pretty much impossible regardless of where you’re from. There’s no place left where you can be free from such things.
As I was lying on the beach in Lospass, huge jetliners would fly over my head over and over again.
They come from some place in the world, pass over me and land somewhere else in the world. This place where I am now is only a point of passage.
“I wonder if I really exist in this world?” Questions like that would suddenly cross my mind, but I was still having a relaxing time.
I used to live in the city, and I was exhausted. My job was to quantify customer data and inputting it into a computer. If you analyze each and every piece of data, you can infer a lot about a person’s life. But what’s the point?
Repeating the same thing each and every day was wearing me down, physically and mentally.
I was also getting tired of to those nightclubs with loud music I would visit on weekends. It was around that time that I met him.
He was a composer of contemporary music, from sountracks for indie films to techno music remixes. We used to talk over drinks, in the middle of the night, in a bar in the middle of the city that only played real Bossa nova records. He was immovable on that point.
Personally, I preferred places like that to those clubs filled with digital beats, because I feel the music you listen to as you get drunk should be the music of the most distant country on earth.
However, I felt a bit uncomfortable around him, as I was pretty much clueless when it came to music.
I would use it to talk about how mundane and debilitating my day-to-day life was.
“It’s like that song, you know the one, that song they make you listen to in music class at junior high-school, and then they’d make you write an appreciation essay.
The orchestra plays the same notes over and over again, and it gets pretty monotonous, but gradually it gets more and more exciting. And then, just as you start to wonder for how long the song is going to go on, it suddenly comes to an end, like it’s interrupted.”
“Ah, Boléro. It’s Ravel’s Boléro, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I think that was the title.”
Actually, my days were nothing like Boléro; there was no gradual crescendo, nor an abrupt interruption. They were something closer to rambling.
“I know what you mean.”