Stillness, Softness... Hinako Omori NNF 2024
An inspired booking by the Festival, and always a pleasure to listen to any kind of live music within the Church of St Peter Mancroft
NNF
The Church of St Peter Mancroft provided the tranquil and atmospheric setting for London-based electronic musician and composer Hinako Omori's Norfolk & Norwich Festival debut, and a performance of her sophomore album, the appropriately entitled 'Stillness, Softness..'.
Omori was born in Yokohama, but moved to London when three years old. Graduating in 2011 from University of Surrey with a Bsc in Music and Sound Recording, she soon gained work in the music industry, as well as working as a session musician with artists like KT Tunstall and Kae Tempest. Her first album release, the ambient and nature-inspired 'A Journey..' was released in 2022. It was followed last year with 'Stillness, Softness...', a work intended to further blur the boundaries between the organic and electronic worlds. A European tour took her to small and intimate venues where she performed the new work with just synthesiser and mixing table, and where audiences would typically sit on the floor with rugs and pillows.
The huge spaces of St Peter Mancroft therefore provided a fresh experience for Omori, with a much larger audience occupying the church pews, and with her usual electronic keyboard instrumentation augmented with grand piano. And, for this special Norfolk and Norwich Festival performance, Omori was also joined by a string quartet and a harpist.
Hinako Omori's vocals are ethereal and breathy, and draw comparison with some of Kate Bush's gentler songs. Yet there is an awful lot of reverb added – so much so that the initial welcome was all but indecipherable, and during her introduction of her accompanying musicians I regrettably failed to catch any of their names. Which is a real shame, as the power and impact of this especially re-worked performance of 'Stillness, Softness...' owed much to the beautiful and emotive playing from each of those five talented musicians.
And, without any programme notes to guide us, we were left a little unsure if, and when, to applaud. The consensus seemed to be that we wait until the end. The performance, essentially, was a chronological run-through of the album's thirteen tracks – an ambient and atmospheric mix of instrumental pieces, some with accompanying lyrics, and some spoken word passages. For those of us less familiar with the piece, some printed guidance would have been helpful.
And there are moments of sheer exquisite pleasure – 'Foundation', for example, is a slow and pensive number with some really interesting lyrics - “Finding a home within, to return back to, where the locks can't be changed, or the keys misplaced”, it hints of a longing for home and stability. 'An Ode to The Heart' is a truly beautiful piece, performed solo tonight on the grand piano, and followed by the haunting 'Epilogue'.
But whilst the string quartet, the harp, the grand piano and the synthesiser all worked wonderfully together within the atmosphere of St Peter Mancroft, it was Omori's vocals that sometimes failed to rise to the grandeur of the location. There were moments where her breathy voice kept reminding me of Julee Cruise from Angelo Badalamanti's television soundtrack to 'Twin Peaks'. At another moment, for some inexplicable reason, my mind was taken back to 1973, and Lynsey de Paul's 'Won't Somebody Dance With Me'.
An inspired booking by the Festival, and always a pleasure to listen to any kind of live music within the Church of St Peter Mancroft. It was just a bit of the shame, perhaps, that the vocals could not have been mixed a little more sympathetically.
