Label: Ki/oon Records
Country: Japan
Release Date: 2007.03.21

Yoshinori Sunahara is a Japanese DJ and club programmer, particularly prominent in the Shibuya-kei and chillout scene. He was born in Sapporo, Japan, on September 13, 1969. His style consists of a mixture of funk, bossa nova, Shibuya-kei, and 70’s music. He is known to be infatuated with airplanes, as several of his albums have to do with flight.

This collection proves, if anything else, that Sunahara’s production talents are just as important to his career than any of his original compositions. I’ve wondered what he’s been doing since his last studio album Love Beat in 2001, and this collection provides some answers.

CD1: comprises of 11 tracks covering his four studio albums. All of the tracks are in their original form except for “Elegant World,” which has a different mix and which has the orchrestral intro and outro cut out as well as the girl speaking (thankfully). These tracks have been remastered. Apart from the standard audio punchup you get from a remastering, I also noticed more of a separation in the mixes. This clarity is more striking when you listen to the tracks through headphones. Perhaps this was the more pressing need for the remastering since we’re dealing with albums that were released fairly recently.

CD2: comprises of his remix work of various artists (most of, if not all, are Japanese) from 1995-2005. As expected from a compilation like this, the quality can be all over the map. I don’t like everything on here, but I liked more than I thought I would. The chillout style is most prominent on this CD. As the songs and years progress, the styles switch. At the end of the CD, you’re getting a Japanese hip-hop song and remixes that sound like they came straight from the early-to-mid 1980’s. There are various sound elements that Sunahara fans have heard before– electronic bleeps and bloops, steel drums, and musical and spoken-word breaks that were used in prior songs.