There is a particular kind of listening that happens when I stop trying to work out exactly what a piece is doing and simply let it reach me. Yuma Koda‘s “ende”, featuring Mei Semones and Yuma Abe, gave me that feeling almost immediately. Its texture is smooth, its atmosphere is delicate, and somewhere between the piano, strings and voices, I found something wonderfully human.
I do not know Yuma Koda, yet discovering that he was born in 1991, the same year as me, unexpectedly made the piece feel closer. Perhaps that sounds like a small detail, but as a musician and composer, I often find myself trying to understand other people’s creative worlds so I can better understand my own. With “ende”, I reached a point where understanding stopped being necessary. I felt it in my bones, in my cells, in my blood. There is something liberating about music that does not demand an explanation before it can mean something to you.
Lyrically, the song has everything I need without spelling everything out. Sonically, I hear jazz, but this is not jazz that feels like it has been politely taken down from our grandparents’ record collection. It feels as if those sounds had travelled much further — perhaps aboard a spaceship sent into the darkness years ago, still carrying fragments of the human soul. The vocals bring another layer of fragility to that picture, while the piano and strings give the song an almost weightless softness. Koda has described wanting the piece to feel like a fragment of a distant memory heard half-asleep during the closing credits of a film, and knowing that makes perfect sense to me, especially considering his childhood surrounded by cinema.
And perhaps that is where “ende” gets me: I still cannot completely understand it, and I am perfectly happy about that. I want to keep listening, not to solve the song, but to feel it again and see what my body notices next. That sense of mystery feels particularly precious in Where the Music Meets, where I am always looking for music that gives me something to sit with rather than handing me every answer. There is something fragile here, something warm and unmistakably human, and I am genuinely glad that Yuma Koda, Mei Semones, Yuma Abe and everyone involved created a piece that leaves me wanting to return. Great work, everyone!
About Yuma Koda:
Born in 1991, Tokyo-based Yuma Koda works across composition, production, film, fashion, performing arts and installation. His background stretches from classical music theory in Italy and Japan to jazz and electronic music, with the philosophy of Toru Takemitsu among his important influences. His work has already earned major recognition, including the Best Original Music Award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for KONTORA and a British Independent Film Awards nomination for The Ceremony. “ende” closes his forthcoming debut full-length “Amid Kinos”, bringing together collaborators including Mei Semones, Yuma Abe, Kei Matsumaru, Shinya Fukumori and Marty Holoubek. For me, though, the most important thing is simpler: this is a composer whose music made me feel a little less alone.
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