Album Review: Hinako Omori - stillness, softness… (Houndstooth)

a journey… was the 2022 debut from Hinako Omori, shaped by the concept of forest bathing and outdoor recordings. stillness, softness… draws breath inward and steadies the room until attention begins to thrum. Omori crafts thirteen linked vignettes that share a bloodstream through an analogue tone bed, warm with a faint electrical shimmer. What you hear is concentration turning into sound and returning as a durable calm. This calm opens the 10th edition of Bucharest Photofest as Control Club welcomes Hinako Omori.

stillness, softness… meets the Jungian shadow self head on, treating the darker, occluded parts of the psyche as material for care rather than rejection. In that spirit, each song is approached as a memory room that you enter, explore, and gently leave. 

From the first seconds, the album's manner of movement is clearly established, each miniature leaning into the next, blurring their edges. Unease aquatically drifts toward composure. Each machine used occupies space, giving stillness, softness… poise. Prophet ’08 pads bloom without glare, Moog Voyager lays a slow tide that lifts the frame, and the UDO Super 6 gives a mild binaural hush that lets the stereo field breathe.

The voice sits close, and Omori sings with calm force on a patient line. Her writing maps the tug between dream states and daylight, between solitude that steadies and isolation that hollows, between fracture and the wish to re-knit. The shadow motif threads the lyrics, appearing as a partner in harmony rather than a villain to be banished. When the second self arrives beneath the lead, pitched down a shade, self-reflection turns into a gentle duet. Rooms become audible as the songs pass, a London bedroom with traffic at a distance and a grandmother’s house in Yokohama, where whispers protect sleeping floors.

Small lyric flashes are delivered with tact. When the title piece murmurs “stillness, softness, like a breath of silk,” the arrangement seems to inhale, and when “your words sparkle in the atmosphere” follows, the chords brighten. These fragments lend the contour to these individual spaces, such as “foundation,” “stalactites,” and “a structure,” where a few words reframe the (personal) space.

To help the ear while preserving the continuum, the album plants quiet waypoints. Early on, the final pitch of one miniature light, the arpeggios of the next and the threshold is crossed in mid-step.“both directions?” eases the door open, and “ember” warms the floor underfoot, the former setting the dual gaze of the record and the latter giving it a first clear melody line. Later, a narrow tremor guides like a lighthouse beam, repainting the harmony. Mid-cycle, “cyanotype memories” introduces the pitched-down double like a shadow stepping into frame, and “in limbo” blurs the boundary between instrumental drift and pop contour. In the final third, a modest piano figure arrives. Percussion remains in outline, so the body senses groove even when the grid barely shows. Drama arrives through ratio and timing, as well as the precise angle at which a filter blossoms or a voice enters and leaves.

Omori’s engineerly ear for how sound occupies air gives stillness, softness… its spine. A whisper carries to the back row, a half decibel in the lower mids articulates the whole frame. Depth holds and shine lands, while reverbs feel like rooms with corners and tails that end with intention.

There is an evident kinship here with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, where synthesis is a living ecology, and harmony grows organically. Similarly, there is an affinity with Susumu Yokota at his most diaphanous. But Omori speaks in her own tone inside that conversation, valuing melody while refusing slogans, keeping the music patient with quiet intent, so the ears want to return.

Agnès Varda offers the right non-musical parallel, since The Gleaners and I lifts potato hearts and frayed rope from the margins, turning salvage into self-care. Omori writes with the same gleaner’s ethic by keeping the breath at the start of a phrase, maintaining small, shimmering detunes, and preserving the room’s signature beside the pads.

By the closing minutes, the title piece settles the cycle with a gentle lift, serving as a careful latch against the night air, and what remains is a sense that stillness is readiness and softness is technique. stillness, softness… holds the door to attention and keeps it open long enough to step through and stand there with steadier hands.