To the Forest to Live a Truer Life begins with a simple physical situation: YoshimiO alone with a piano and her voice in a café surrounded by forest. Yet almost nothing on the finished record remains simple. The piano is pulled apart, voices multiply into strange populations, silence becomes active material, and modular synthesis spreads through the original performances like roots moving beneath soil. The album is not a document of someone escaping civilization to make “natural” music. It is about what happens when human expression, acoustic space and electronic transformation stop behaving as separate categories.
The project’s fused name, YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduO, joins YoshimiO with producer IzumikiYoshi, also known as Izumi Kiyoshi. It looks less like a normal collaboration credit than a new organism assembled from both identities. That awkwardly extended name describes the working method accurately. YoshimiO supplied the primary matter through improvised piano and voice. IzumikiYoshi fed those recordings into a modular synthesizer, reshaping them until performance and processing could no longer be divided cleanly. The result does not sound like one musician accompanied by another. It sounds like a shared system learning how to breathe.
YoshimiO’s history makes the quiet origin of the album especially striking. Through Boredoms, OOIOO and numerous collaborative projects, she has spent decades working with percussion, noise, repetition, communal energy and performances capable of turning rhythm into an almost architectural force. Even when OOIOO becomes intricate or playful, its music often depends upon several bodies locking into patterns together. To the Forest to Live a Truer Life removes that visible collective machinery. There is no conventional band, no drum kit driving the music forward and no fixed genre structure waiting to organize the material.
What remains is not minimalism in the polite sense. The album can be sparse, but it is never empty. Its silence contains room tone, breath, decaying piano resonance and the implied presence of the forest outside the recording space. Small sounds matter because nothing has been placed over them to establish hierarchy. A soft vocal movement can carry as much structural weight as a forceful piano chord. The music asks the listener to abandon the usual distinction between central event and background environment.
The album was recorded primarily during October 2020 at Maho-roba, a café situated in a Japanese forest. The setting matters, but not because birdsong or wind are displayed as scenic proof of authenticity. Nature enters indirectly, through the conditions imposed upon attention. In a quiet environment, an acorn falling can become an event. Distance changes scale. The ear begins detecting relationships that would disappear beneath urban machinery, amplified performance or ordinary domestic noise.
That altered attention shapes YoshimiO’s piano playing. She does not treat the instrument as a vehicle for composed melodies, harmonic demonstrations or jazz-style improvisational display. The piano becomes a large resonant object whose keys, strings, body and surrounding air can be activated. Notes may appear alone, collect briefly into unstable formations or leave long trails after the hands have moved elsewhere. Rather than confidently claiming the room, the playing seems to investigate it.
There is an important humility in this approach. Improvised music can easily become a theater of mastery, with spontaneity offered as evidence of the performer’s speed, vocabulary or intuition. YoshimiO avoids that display. Her improvisation sounds less like unrestricted personal expression than close observation. She places sounds into the environment and listens to what returns. The pause after a gesture is not hesitation. It is part of the gesture.
Her voice behaves in a similar way. It does not consistently deliver lyrics, take control through conventional singing or explain the emotional meaning of the music. It appears as breath, syllable, cry, murmur, sustained tone and language on the edge of formation. At moments the voice feels intensely human; elsewhere processing makes it resemble an animal call, a synthetic signal or several distant people occupying different layers of time.
This ambiguity is one of the album’s deepest strengths. The voice is commonly treated as the element that humanizes experimental music, giving listeners a recognizable body amid abstraction. Here the human voice is itself transformed into unstable material. YoshimiO does not disappear, but the borders around her presence become porous. The album suggests that identity may be something produced through contact rather than something sealed inside one body.
IzumikiYoshi’s processing is crucial because it does not merely polish or decorate the forest recordings. The modular synthesizer becomes a method of germination. Small parts of YoshimiO’s performances are repeated, stretched, filtered, layered and redirected until hidden qualities begin to emerge. A piano attack may become percussion. Its decay may widen into atmosphere. A vocal fragment may split into rhythm or bloom into a dense choral mass.
Electronic processing is often associated with artificiality, while unedited field or acoustic recording is described as natural. To the Forest to Live a Truer Life quietly dismantles that opposition. A modular synthesizer is no less capable of organic behavior than a piano. Both are constructed devices whose results depend upon material, pressure, tuning, chance and interaction. The electronics do not invade the forest material from outside. They reveal another possible life already folded inside it.
The word “truer” in the title therefore deserves suspicion. The album does not present the forest as a morally pure realm where modern life can be abandoned. There is no pastoral fantasy of returning to an untouched human condition. The recording equipment, piano, microphone, synthesizer and editing process remain essential. The forest does not remove technology. It changes how technology is heard and used.
A truer life, in this music, may mean a life less committed to fixed divisions: nature against machine, performer against producer, voice against instrument, intention against accident. The album repeatedly allows these categories to leak into one another. Its truth is not a final message waiting beneath the abstractions. It is the temporary honesty of listening closely enough to notice change while it happens.
This helps explain why the record feels coherent despite its refusal of ordinary song form. Its eleven pieces are not chapters in a narrative or separate compositions competing for individual identity. They behave more like windows opened onto one continuing process. Different densities, vocal treatments and piano movements pass through, but the same underlying questions remain present. How little sound is required to establish a world? At what point does repetition become a new organism? When does a recognizable voice stop belonging to one person?
The sequencing gradually widens the album’s scale. Early passages establish intimacy, leaving enough open space to hear each object entering the recording. As it develops, the relationship among piano, voice and synthesis grows harder to separate. Sounds gather into larger formations without turning toward a conventional climax. The record expands laterally rather than marching upward. New pathways keep appearing beside the existing ones.
This lateral movement distinguishes the album from ambient music designed primarily to create a stable mood. Its quietness can be immersive, but it is never passive. Details continually alter the balance. A repeated fragment may become unexpectedly insistent. A delicate piano figure may be interrupted by a vocal presence too physical to remain decorative. Electronics may suddenly expose the artificial frame around a passage that had seemed purely acoustic.
The music is peaceful only if peace is understood as alertness rather than comfort. It contains calm surfaces, but beneath them is the unpredictable motion of improvisation. Nothing guarantees that a sound will return or develop according to familiar logic. The listener is asked to remain attentive without being rewarded by obvious resolution.
That requirement connects the album to YoshimiO’s more rhythmically aggressive work. Boredoms and OOIOO often create intensity through repetition, forcing attention into cycles that gradually change from within. To the Forest to Live a Truer Life applies a related discipline at lower volume and with fewer obvious rhythmic landmarks. Repetition still changes perception, but the body is no longer driven by drums. The ear must generate its own pulse.
The album’s original physical presentation extends its methods beyond sound. A limited Japanese edition was assembled with photography by Takashi Homma, artwork by Syoujou Ooido, a zine, poster, silkscreen and assorted objects, framing the release as a collection of related traces rather than a standard commercial package. The artwork and objects do not explain the recording. They continue its interest in materials passing between human hands, landscape, reproduction and transformation.
That attention to the physical object is particularly fitting for music assembled through processes that are easy to mistake for immaterial. Digital files and modular signals may appear abstract, but every sound here begins in physical action: air crossing the throat, fingers striking keys, hammers meeting strings, vibrations moving through a room. Even the most altered passages retain that buried contact. The electronics do not erase the body. They scatter its evidence.
The cover’s forest imagery may initially suggest retreat, but the album itself feels more like entry. The listener is not shown a picturesque landscape from a comfortable distance. The music moves beneath ordinary visual scale, toward vibration, decay, echo and gradual mutation. The forest becomes less a collection of trees than a model for organization. Separate living things share space, compete, cooperate and exchange matter through systems that are mostly invisible.
YoshimiO and IzumikiYoshi construct the record in the same way. Piano, voice and electronics retain their individual characteristics while participating in a larger network. There is no need for one element to dominate. Meaning comes from circulation.
That makes the album’s title sound less like an instruction to leave society and more like a proposal for another mode of attention. “To the forest” names a movement away from habitual noise. “To live a truer life” names the possibility that may open once hearing becomes less possessive. The music does not seize every moment and label it. It lets sounds remain partly unknown.
This refusal is especially valuable in an era when experimental music is often surrounded by explanatory concepts that determine the listener’s response in advance. To the Forest to Live a Truer Life has a clear origin and process, but it does not become an illustration of either. Knowing how it was recorded does not exhaust what the sounds can suggest. The album preserves enough uncertainty to keep changing according to the listener’s own attention.
Its most radical quality may be its lack of conquest. The forest is not captured, sampled as exotic atmosphere or turned into a dramatic backdrop for human expression. YoshimiO enters, performs and listens. IzumikiYoshi later extends that listening through machines. Both musicians allow the source material to resist total control.
The finished record is therefore neither a raw document nor a heavily produced correction of one. It holds recording and reconstruction in equilibrium. The original moment remains audible, but it is also permitted to develop lives that could not have existed in the café itself.
To the Forest to Live a Truer Life turns retreat into expansion. By reducing the initial materials to piano and voice, YoshimiO creates a field open enough for tiny events to carry enormous consequences. By routing those events through modular synthesis, IzumikiYoshi does not close the field. He discovers further clearings inside it.
The album leaves the forest without pretending to own what happened there. What survives is a chain of transformations: breath becomes signal, piano becomes weather, silence becomes structure and improvisation becomes an environment with no obvious edge. The truer life promised by the title is not a destination. It is the moment when listening becomes participation and every sound is allowed to be more than one thing.
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