Hinako Omori: ‘I guess I was very lucky that things unfolded in the way they did’

Soon after completing her studies a friend suggested she might enjoy putting her piano playing skills to use as a session musician, and one invitation seemed to lead to another. Among the artists she’s worked with are Ellie Goulding, KT Tunstall, Georgia and James Bay. As we talk, she is gearing up for a tour with Kae Tempest.

“I guess I was very lucky that things unfolded in the way they did,” she says. “It’s all been very family-led. Georgia I knew as a friend from music-related things and she introduced me to Kae, then through Kae I met other people. Maybe it’s the case in other industries and I’m not really aware of it because I’ve only really worked in music, but I love the synchronicities of that, meeting new people along the way.”

In 2019 she began branching out with a couple of EPs of her own. This month sees the release of her debut album, ‘a journey...’, a collection of ten ambient pieces that brings together Omori’s interests in therapeutic frequencies, forest bathing and binaural sound.

The album came about “from a very kind invitation” from Real World Studios near Bath, she explains. “In the summer of 2020 I got a call from my friend Ollie Jacobs, who’s now head engineer at Real World, which is a studio I’ve adored for a while. He said because Womad festival couldn’t happen in person because of the pandemic they were going to do an online immersive experience ad would I be interested in being involved. I’d been interested in using binaural sound anyway so this was an opportunity to explore that and understand it a bit better.

“I was just really grateful for the opportunity because I don’t think the album would have been created per se if it wasn’t for that invitation. It was all born of me playing around with audio snippets that had been on my hard drive.”

Having only a few weeks to get something together focused her endeavours. She seems pleased with the results that also draw on her fascination with forest bathing, a pastime popular in Japan where Omori was born. “Every time I go back to Japan it feels quite a natural thing that I feel we need to do when I’m there,” she says. “There are so many temples and shrines and they’re always surrounded by beautiful woodlands, so whenever I go there it’s like a real palace to go and recharge and I think I’ve been really conscious of that. Especially during the pandemic as well, just being to access nature and calming any stressed feelings, to try and reconnect with nature and the abundance of beautiful things we have around us. So when this opportunity came up I thought it would be such a nice way to document the sounds of the forest and hopefully present something to people that weren’t able to access nature easily at the time, to listen to it and be able to disappear into the forest for a while.”

Omori is keen for people to build their own narratives into the music. “Especially anything with lyrics, I’m very conscious for anyone that’s going to listen to it to take their own message from it,” she says. “I’m very conscious of putting too much out there in lyrics, because what it means to me might not necessarily be the same (to someone else). I don’t want to put too much of a spin on something and force a narrative. Hopefully there’s something in there either instrumentally or lyrically that might connect with people, and I think that’s the best thing you can really ask for with music, it’s the connection. I’d just be really grateful if the listener could enjoy it and take their own message from it.”

The song The Richest Garden in Your Memory is based on a poem by the American writer and philosopher Emily R Grosholz, who Omori befriended on a flight to New York. “It always make me laugh when I tell the story, because you never know how much you’re going to interact with the people you’re sat next to on a plane,” Omori says. “We were quite shy at the beginning but we basically spoke the whole flight and got on really well and connected afterwards on email and ever since then Emily has been sending me lots of her work, which I’m so grateful for.

“Emily is a lecturer and philosopher at Pennsylvania University, she has written an published numerous books and they’ve been translated in so many different languages. It’s really incredible to see Emily’s output and really beautiful to connect with it. Emily very kindly sent me this book called The Great Circles that she wrote, it’s about philosophy and poetry, it covers so many bases and it’s really deep and insightful.

“This poem just jumped out at me and I was so floored by it and I immediately emailed Emily saying ‘I feel a really strong urge to put some music to it, and would you be open to this idea?’ and Emily very kindly said she’d be happy for me to do that. It’s really interesting, it was probably the quickest song to come about on the record as well. I sat with the lyrics for a while and sat down at the piano and pressed record. I recorded it in a take and sent it to Emily and she was really happy with it, so that was it. I’m really honoured for that connection.”

‘a journey...’ is out now. Hinako Omori will be part of Kae Tempest’s band who play at Leeds Stylus on May 11, Asylum in Hull on May 12 and Sheffield Octagon on May 15. www.hinakoomori.com