Hiroshi Yoshimura – A・I・R (Air In Resort)

Sounds great after a thorough wet cleaning, just a few insignificant pop and clicks, nothing major. The beautiful music plays clearly.

FYI there is an illegal bootleg going around of this. stay away!

Except for a few clicks on side b, my copy plays absolutely perfect, after a thorough vacuum cleaning (haven't played it before cleaning it, never do it). It's not only quiet but the sound has clarity, transparency and fullness. Being a promo record, it was done with much more care than most "for sale" releases. Not surprising coming from mid 80's Japan.

The poor playback quality most copies have is not due to pressing issues or the drop of perfume; it's from the PVC bag that this record came in (the clear one, now usually yellowed). These bags "gas out" and cause a deposit on the surface of the record that merges with the PVC the record is made of, hence the issues.
This is a very common problem with records from the 70s and 80s that came in these clear plastic sleeves.
This also contributes to the bad reputation of picture discs (same issue - poor sound quality often comes from the PVC bag, not the poor pressing).

Some tunes on the SEA SIDE actually caused my phono amp to clip (!). I'm using an AudioTechnica VM540ML cartridge with a Pro-Ject Phono Box DS2, the amp is set to 47k ohm, 100 pF and 40dB gain. Dozens of records played perfectly in this arrangement. Reducing the ohms to 100 seemed to give better results in getting rid of the clipping. This is very strange, has anyone seen something like this?

If anyone wants to sell just the bag and insert let me know :-)

So nice that this still obtainable on analogue vinyl compared to the rest of his output. This one sounds the most like a Brian Eno Ambient album. If you told me it was Brian Eno's Ambient 5 playing I'd believe it. Side one on mine sounds great without issue. Side two has more snaps but I haven't tried to clean it. It doesn't detract much from the experience for me, and I like meditating to albums like this, where distraction is not welcome.

There's pressing issues, but it actually sounds better after a round of cleaning with a Vinyl Vac.

“Mori No Yoake” is the name of A1 and appears to translate into English as something like “Dawn in the Forest”. Google Translate offers “Along the creek” as the translation of A2 and “Bird kite Chino Cafe” as the translation of A3. B1 is translated as “Sparkling waters”, B2 as “Eitaira line of gull” and B3 as “Star of sand”.

This was commissioned and given away at a launch event in 1984 for a perfume made by the Shiseido cosmetics company and each copy was presented in a green bag liberally sprayed with the scent. It will likely still linger on copies today.

From both my own experience and a couple of things I’ve read, it would seem that all copies are very badly pressed and so had obvious hisses and crackles when new. Correct me if I’m wrong though.

The music is beautiful, as is the artwork.

I'm just listening to this and my cat wants to enter the speakers ; )