Yuri Umemoto - Concerts

FINALLY: chamber music for our times! Music that gets me so excited that, ignoring basic principles of caution, I write the following statement in the very first lines of this review: we live in an amazing time for music, and Yuri Umemoto's debut album is my AOTY.

Due to Umemoto's proximity to and/or involvement with some of my favourite projects to burst out from the European avant-pop scene—Felicity J Lord, Solicity, and Jazz Lambaux—I spent half a year hyping myself up, eagerly anticipating what I felt would be one of the most important debut albums of 2026. This is not from the perspective of a music historian (which I'm not), but from the perspective my tastes have built for me —as someone seeking new experiences in music at that adored vantage point of mine, the crossroads of pop and avant-garde.

On paper, the promise held by Yuri Umemoto was too good to be true: that of a classically trained young composer building bridges between 20th-century classical & avant-garde music (Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros & Steve Reich) and mid 2020's  jackzebra, Duwap Kaine, tm & Klein. In principle, Concerts might be the result of the aforementioned marriage, but only from a very distant theoretical point of view. In practice, it is a series of 7 short trio pieces—the seven days of a Japanese week (starting with Sunday)—in the lineage of French impressionists and British pastoralists: Reynaldo Hahn & Ravel, Simon Jeffes' Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Dolly Mixture. 

There's no doubt that the formal experiments of his former Bandcamp releases paved the way for the technical dispositif at the heart of Concerts (a metronomic voice backed by surgical renditions of scores written for violin and cello by Yuri Umemoto), but the somewhat cold and highly conceptual feel of his previous compositions has given way to lyrical, radiant, and swiftly shape-shifting pieces. Seven pieces evocative of youthful joys and turmoils—those I associate with feelings of feeling, seeing, and listening—and the opposite frustrations of emotional blindness and deafness ("no music in your head [...] nanimo kikoenai"). Though they recall themes explored by Mishima over sixty years ago—as in his 1963 short story, Fountains in the Rain, in which he describes similar experiences so vividly and painfully—and while the music itself finds its sources in Proustian times, Yuri Umemoto's Concerts so accurately resonates with the kind of doom-scrolling numbness we acutely and experience in 2026. (M/M - wholesale: shops, contact us)