Mark Barrott - Icarus (イカロス) / One Friday In September (9月のある金曜日)

Mark Barrott presents the second single, a double a-side 'Icarus (イカロス) / One Friday In September (9月のある金曜日)' from his upcoming eight-track album 'Jōhatsu (蒸発)'.
Barrott’s new album, 'Jōhatsu (蒸発)', released on Reflections, the new downtempo label from the Anjuna family, is a full departure from anything Barrott’s written before, partly because he was writing to moving picture. Towards the end of 2019, Barrott had been working so relentlessly as a record producer for artists like DJ Themba and the late Virgil Abloh, that he developed Repetitive Strain Injury. He was forced to take time off, and it was during this down-time that he was asked to write the score for a new documentary, Jōhatsu (蒸発) ... the art of Evaporation.
“Shame is a huge part of Japanese culture,” Barrott explains from his home studio in rural Ibiza. “There’s shame surrounding losing your job, divorce, bankruptcy; and it’s been there for centuries, since the Samurai and Bushido.” Jōhatsu (蒸発) is the process of paying a company for a totally new identity and life. Those who do it will disappear permanently, moving to another part of the country or the world. The documentary shadowed a Japanese man as he went through this process, moving from central Kyoto to Scandinavia. Scene notes from the director and shots of Kyoto at night time, rural Japan and Scandinavian forest-scapes informed his musical direction.
“I hadn’t felt so creatively liberated in a very long time,” Barrott says. “There had been conceptual constraints I’d placed on my creativity, and I didn’t even realise until I started writing to picture. It reminded me of the happy accidents in the early days of house, when there were no rules.”
Barrott says every track on the album started with improvisation, which meant some productions were written in the space of an afternoon. That’s how 'Icarus (イカロス)' came to be. It was written, or channelled, on the fly and came out almost too easily. 'One Friday in September (9月のある金曜日)' was created entirely with piano and field recordings. There’s melancholy in its simplicity and the track is inspired by the experience of finding something you didn’t know you’d lost and then having it ripped away again too soon. “It’s about loss and how the soul learns through experience on its journey to divine awareness,” Barrott says. “It says don’t listen to the mind. The mind limits the experience. Listen to the heart, because that’s where the truth resides.”
'Jōhatsu (蒸発)' is out 17th April on Reflections. The second single 'Icarus (イカロス) / One Friday In September (9月のある金曜日)' is out now.