This is an album of 10 songs written by Japan's Hiroshi Kono and produced by Scotland's Roger Fife. The songs have a gentle easy-listening approach with Spanish guitar as the prominent instrument. English, Italian and Portugese lyrics leave me in the dark. Words from a monologue "To the Winners (Of Love)" open the album with a tumble of 60s concept album stuff. After that it's very smooth but a bit dull. There's a lovely baby gurgling on the end of track 5's "Erika".
The overall concept is difficult to grasp – musically or culturally. A random-generator programme seems to have put the words "to make simple, yet melodic songs with only classical guitars and vocals in various languages to optimise the unique characteristics of the language" onto the press releases. The "only classical guitars" was clearly never a starter. We have all sorts of keyboards and other enhancement and more kinds of guitar too. They're OK in a non-obtrusive way. Hiroshi's guitar playing is mellow and precise. The parts where it comes to the foreground (such as the introduction to 80s-sounding "Silent Mirror" are easily the most interesting parts of the album
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Maybe if the CD had come with no more than the tunes, it would have been easier. The project concept makes no difference to a listener. It throws a weight onto the music that it simply doesn't need to carry. The nearest experience I have to listening to this rather amorphous music is sitting in European hotel rooms in the early hours watching the local arts discussion programme as it takes a musical break and the work-experience monkeys get to screen their special project video of coast, forest, rivers and mountains. So rather than being polyglot and multicultural The Mar Project ends up as non-communicative and anodyne.
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