Polish trio Hinode Tapes recently released Ita, their third album for Instant Classic and Kanu Kanu Recordings, which introduces Japanese double bassist Hiroki Chiba—a frequent collaborator with Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, and Otomo Yoshihide—into the fold alongside core members Piotr Chęcki, Piotr Kaliński, and Jacek Prościński. The collaboration, facilitated by WRWTFWW Records' Albert Karch, represents a shift for the group: where their previous work leaned toward darker territories, Ita brings into brighter registers, incorporating bells, triangles, and janissaries while maintaining a blend of ambient textures and free jazz improvisation. Recorded on vintage multi-track tape equipment that demanded decisive musical choices, the album also incorporates environments that Kaliński captured during earlier travels to Japan, where the group recently toured and performed alongside legendary figures like Inoyama Land and Chihei Hatakeyama.
At first appearance, Hinode Tapes' latest release seems very at home in the ambient music genre; the album features unobtrusive field recordings, breathy synthesizers with sustained tones, generous amounts of reverb, and a slowly undulating sense of pace. Upon focused listening, however, the release has a complexity of musical layers that pushes it into the realm of free jazz, especially with the percussion performed by Jacek Prościński. There is a sense of drive that breaks through the static glaze of ambient and pushes into the intensity of live performance, of musicians compelling an audience with their combined energy and presence.
When listening in headphones, the first track on the album ("Hinode Tapes #11") felt like a sonic massage, putting me into a meditative state with a sensation of floating. The music gave me a feeling of being "unlocked," of dwelling in the present moment through the beautifully recorded and mixed double bass paired with pulsing harmonic synth layers, triangle and metals, and the sounds of running water and insects.
Track four ("Hinode Tapes #14") evolves into something ecstatic, a quality of intense prayer through the double bass glissandi into upper-partial natural harmonics with plenty of delay and reverb, almost going into Blade Runner darksynth territory with the electronic instruments, always with a driving percussion background. The album is like four small moments in a free jazz quartet that are stretched out into a full meditative track each, bathed in reverb and shaped into complex ASMR-triggering textures.
I spoke with band member Piotr Kaliński on May 9 about the album. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Chaz Underriner: Can you tell me about the name Hinode Tapes and that of the album Ita?
Piotr Kaliński: Hinode in Japanese is "sunrise." My colleagues from the band and I met, and we wanted to start something new, something different. Not to copy the bands already existing, including our own bands, because sometimes we even play together in other projects. We wanted to start a new path, one that was totally unknown even to us, and we felt that maybe we could find some inspiration in Japanese music, which we were listening to a lot at the time.
We even switched from our main instruments to emulate the sound of electronic musicians. I switched to guitar, field recordings, and post-production, which I also treat as an instrument in this record, not only as a technique, but more like dub in Jamaica. It's not just a type of music. When you touch the knobs, it's artistic expression.
The drummer typically uses a lot of electronic drums in his setup, but in Hinode Tapes, he plays strictly acoustic instruments, which are very minimalist, and sometimes it's not even real drums. He uses a lot of stuff from the kitchen, including various objects, belts, metal objects, cans, or whatever. And Piotr, the saxophonist, also uses a lot of effects on the saxophone and synthesizers, so we wanted to record all this stuff during our rehearsal on tape.
Rather than editing a lot of takes, I will simply record it as it was at the moment. And that's why it's called Hinode Tapes. It's a new day for the path of our lives of being musicians. And also, all our records were recorded on tape and released on tape later. So that's why the name is Hinode Tapes.
And Ita—the name of the album—is maybe a little bit of an inside joke for us because I learned a little bit of Japanese for a couple of years, and sometimes I found there's a lot of incorrect meanings from books and the translators and so on. I wanted to call it Han, which is an object in Buddhist temples. However, when I created artwork for the album, our Japanese friend said, “This is a correct sign, but nobody uses it." And so it was like, “Oh, so is it correct or not?" And they were like, "yes and no." And so, actually, this sign could be read as Ita. I was like, oh, Ita, it's a different word. It's similar to a piece of wood, but it also refers to a plate. In the Polish language, "plate" means a record. So Ita is a record.
Chaz: Tell me more about the aesthetic connections between Japanese music, Japanese art, and the project.
Piotr: For us, the main goal was to keep the extreme minimalism in our music, to focus more on the sound and atmosphere, but without stepping into territory of "chill out, relaxing muzak stuff," which is actually really dangerous when you walk on the line between ambient and being inspired by far east culture. It's a bit risky to take this inspiration to the Western world. Also, I didn't want to just adapt it to my own art because it's not my culture. But the aesthetics of Japan are extremely important.
I had visited Japan many times before, and I was collecting records and attending many concerts. And I found it's totally different from what we are doing here in Poland. I was a little bit bored with European music in general, including alternative, electronic, and jazz. It was repeating itself, and I want to add a little fresh air to it. And we thought, “Oh, maybe we should focus on this a little bit," and the guys were like, "Yeah, this is really interesting." And so extreme minimalism. Almost like meditating during recording and playing, but also not just jamming for two hours. It’s also very strict, and it allows for recreating it later in concerts as a formal composition.
I was listening to Satoshi Ashikawa’s music, the guy from the early eighties. There was very simple piano music, almost like a repeating pattern, that went on for ten minutes, but it was so precise, and it wasn’t just a random loop. I usually don't like this, because it's so easy to make nowadays, especially using all the software, AI, etc. We wanted to use as many acoustic and analog instruments as possible to avoid easy patterns created by the computer.
We also wanted to be sure of what we were doing. That's why we’re using tapes, so there’s no overdubbing. Because we’re recording this on a four-track recorder, it’s simple: you have expensive tape, and it's one take, one track per person. This was the main inspiration. And I think the Japanese music from the eighties was also mainly made at home or in home studios using four-track recorders on a very simple setup. The music is timeless and has a very strong meaning and emotions, and doesn't have to be super-overproduced to be amazing. And we thought, "Oh, so maybe we could also do it this way."
Chaz: So, you were reflecting Japanese music in both aesthetic and methodology?
Piotr: Yeah. So, it’s minimalist both technically and aesthetically, in artistic meaning. Minimalism is the key for us.
Chaz: I'm curious about the album being situated between jazz and ambient, and how you described it as a difficult and risky space. If you go too far into ambient, you get into muzak territory. I was really surprised when I listened to the album multiple times. Especially on headphones, it put me in a meditative place. It doesn't surprise me that creating the music was a meditative experience. But I also, as a jazz musician myself, clearly hear the jazz in it, especially in the percussion. So, how do you approach this aesthetic space?
Piotr: That's a mixture of our personalities because our drummer and saxophonist have a total jazz background. They're jazz musicians but are also very open-minded. That's the thing in Poland right now: we have a very big jazz scene and a lot of musicians and universities, but it’s a little bit boring, in a way, very conservative. Many jazz musicians keep running away from the jazz territory into electronic or experimental music. We wanted to incorporate the jazz elements, including jazz instruments, but in a completely different approach. For example, we are reducing the drum setup and also keeping the drum track as a layer, rather than an instrument full of sounds, like on ECM recordings, which have this deep sound.
So jazz is like a little bit of color in our music. It's more like paint, like one of the colors on the wall. Every time the recording was too ambient or too jazzy, we were like, "No, let's go back and start again with our own vision." When any of the demo tracks were too similar to our own projects or the music we’re familiar with, we thought, “Let's skip it." We wanted to preserve the originality, but also explore a bit of jazz technique in a different world, in different territories. For us, it’s a completely unknown experiment.
Chaz: It's interesting how you talk about filtering. You're trying these iterations of it, and it's like, “No, this one's too far this way, this one's too much like our other stuff." It seems really difficult as a compositional process.
Piotr: And we are also very restricted. If anything sounds close to our inspirations, it means we need to cancel another one.
Chaz: Another thing I was really taken with in the album is the textures, the multiple layers in different frequency bands, and the overall combination of all the elements. Sometimes you have a simple texture with two or three layers, and sometimes it's more complex, with eight or nine layers in the texture. Can you talk to me about how the group is thinking about texture and the ideas behind it?
Piotr: I think we always think about textures like setting up the room. There’s a floor that features drums: small details that resemble paintings on the walls and the colors of the wall. And then there's something in the middle of the room, usually the saxophone, which is like a little bit the main instrument in the record and the band in general.
But we also invited a fourth member to the project, Japanese musician Hiroki Chiba, who plays the double bass. So we also reduce our own stuff to make some space for him. More space for him, which means less space for us, but it was great. Actually, Hiroki was the only person who was not recording his parts on the tape. That's why you can hear sometimes more layers—he was doing overdubbing by himself, and I think that's very interesting.
Sometimes the record is very narrow, and the sounds are either very close or very far away. But Hiroki is in the spotlight, and we want to give him some attention, not just to be like a bass player, which sometimes is hard to focus on.
Having a limit of four instruments is important for us, as it prevents us from overdosing on a patchwork of sounds. And we also try not to use too many effects and studio techniques. We try as much as possible to use natural sounds and to later recreate them during the concert. Hiroki came to Poland a few days ago, and we played this album live, and that was what we did.
Chaz: I think it's effective and a good collaboration. And especially on the first track, you give Chiba a lot of room, and he plays as a soloist in that context.
Piotr: Yeah, I'm very happy, thank you. But the thing which was actually missing in the end, a little bit, was this kind of glue between analog and digital, the recordings of Hiroki and the band. I felt that maybe I should use my own field recordings, which I had been doing a lot of in Japan. The nature there sounds different from the sounds of nature in Eastern Europe.
I was listening to a lot of Japanese records that used field recordings, and I thought, “Ah, this is a little bit kitschy to play background forest sounds." But then I realized: why not? Let's try it. And it's actually the glue between all those instruments and the worlds, and it sounds maybe a little bit like the band is playing outside. On the field recording, there are no human sounds, so it's all nature. Nobody will interrupt your listening with some other context.
That's the thing that I started using in my own production in many projects. Before, I really liked precise, super clean records. I use a lot of tapes now. You have this noise or hiss that I think is great. That's why the old records sound good. That's why vinyl and tapes are interesting, because actually, the music never sounds super crystal clear.
I grew up with tapes. I'm a nineties kid. Later, when I bought CD versions of the records I knew well, I thought, “Ah, this isn’t the sound I liked." It's this dirt in the sound that I like.
Chaz: Absolutely. I also grew up with tapes. Tapes and CDs.
Piotr: CDs in Poland in the nineties were extremely expensive; it was a little bit strange. I don't know why, because, for example, tapes were $4, but the CD version of the same thing was $20. And nobody knows why, because the production costs of CDs are cheaper than tapes. But for many years, CDs were a little bit exclusive in this part of the world. I only had a tape player, not a CD player, because it was too expensive.
It was still a remnant of the communist era and the 1980s. Sometimes the limitations are very inspirational, and perhaps that’s why a lot of music from Eastern Europe right now has an analog sound; it’s because of the music we were listening to in the alternative scene, and how it was recorded using a very simple recording setup. It depended on no budget at all. So we grew up with that sound. Nobody is intentionally trying to switch from a very nice sound to something old-school and vintage. No, it's actually our normal sound, very typical for the time and region.
Chaz: That's really interesting. I had no idea.
Piotr: Yeah, I think this story is sometimes forgotten. I was always very interested in studio techniques. It was the same in Jamaica with dub music in the seventies, because all those records sounded amazing due to their simple tape machines, tape echoes, and basic mixing desks. And later, you have like super crystal Bob Marley records, which are so far away from Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s stuff. And it was actually recorded almost at the same time. There was Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby, working with a very limited budget, whereas Marley was signed to a major record label with access to big studios and professional producers.
We also used a lot of equipment from the eighties and nineties, including Russian, East German, and Czechoslovakian amps and guitars, which were far from perfect. Or Soviet clones of Korg and Roland synthesizers, which are massive and analog with a more brutal sound. The idea was to copy the Japanese or American sound, but the final result was quite Soviet and tough.
Chaz: Tell me about your collaboration with Hiroki Chiba. Did Hinode Tapes record tracks and then send them to Chiba to overdub on?
Piotr: I wanted to go to Japan and record all this stuff together, but it was just simply technically impossible. So, Hinode Tapes made a demo by recording on tape. Then, Chiba recorded his parts. I mixed a little bit on tape and also used tape emulators on the computer. His approach was pretty much the same as what we were doing. He just sent one take per track, so it was very simple, yet solid and assured.
And I was like, "OK, he knows what he's doing." Chiba is a great musician. He's famous as a sideman for many projects, ranging from jazz to alternative and even pop music. But everybody knows him for his quality and being very sure of what he's doing. That's something I like about the Japanese people—when they do something, they are sure about it. And if they're not, they avoid it and pretend that they don't know. It's just like if you want to talk to someone in Japan in English. In Japan, if someone doesn’t feel very confident about their English, they usually say, “Sorry, I don't speak English." But actually, they do a little, but they're afraid they might make a mistake. I think it's very connected to the culture and general attitude of Japan that there's some kind of demand to be really sure about what you are doing. And I really like it. That was a big inspiration for us to focus on what we are doing: no bullshit, no fillers, just straight to the point.
Chaz: Is there anything else you'd like to talk about for the record?
Piotr: It was really interesting to collaborate with someone where there was a language barrier to communicate with. But it was amazing how, with the power of music, a group of people from Poland could completely understand a person from Japan, a far-away country. During the recordings, I was the only person who personally knew Hiroki Chiba, and yet he fit the mood exactly, like reading my colleagues’ minds. And later, when we were playing concerts, it was the same. We didn't need to talk to each other that much, but we understood each other 100%. It's amazing.
And for me, as someone who lives very close to the border of a country where a war is still ongoing, it’s the message of ‘let’s do things together, even when we are far away.’ Let's find things that could connect us rather than divide us. That's why art is so important—it’s not only entertainment, but also a bridge between countries and cultures. This was really interesting for us, as it wasn't just an Asian fixation of the band but was rather a true experiment with people who didn't know each other beforehand. I'm proud of this.
Chaz: Absolutely. The connection between people with music is amazing.
Piotr: It sounds a little bit hippie, but it really is true. I was in Ukraine long ago. I have many friends from Ukraine, and they say a great deal about how important music and art are to them right now, and how people don't want to always focus on the negative side of life. It's more like people choose to make beautiful things and create good things. And I think it's very important for many countries right now because of what's going on with politics all around the world, from America to Europe and Russia, to India and Pakistan. It's important to focus on seeing and looking for inspiration in something to adopt and to share. That was also the spirit of the record.
Hinode Tapes and Hiroki Chiba's Ita is out now on Instant Classic and Kanu Kanu Recordings. You can purchase the album from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice.
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