Haruomi Hosono’s first album in seven years is something of a balancing act. “I feel a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self—as if I now carry two musical worlds within me,” he said. This is remarkable when you consider just how vast the musical world of his former self is. Hosono towers over pop music as an artist who was both one of its chief architects and particularly invested in seeing how he could knock it down and rebuild it again. His catalog marks him as a sort of Janus, looking both inward and out. His work with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, for instance, was decidedly pioneering, establishing the foundation for the 1980s electro-pop boom before anyone even knew it was going to happen. At the same time, much of his solo output was significantly introspective; not in a navel-gazing way, but in a way that devoted itself to understanding what music, and what pop music, really is or was, a task that was and remains somewhat impossible, though far from fruitless. What Hosono’s work seems particularly committed to proving—and Yours Sincerely is no exception—is that as a genre, pop music shape-shifts restlessly and perpetually, and it is for the musician to either keep up or cause the shifts themselves. Hosono’s list of influences is long and eclectic, and he has, in turn, been an influence for an equally long and eclectic list. Much ink has been spilled on who in particular has been influenced by him, but that seems to miss the point (as well as being uncomfortably Western-centric). His significance is more deep-rooted than these fairly new artists, particularly in his native Japan, where much of his commitment to breaking new ground resulted in bringing new sounds to bigger audiences (his band Happy End, for example, were the first to sing rock music in the Japanese language, prompting the development of J-rock in the seventies and eighties). That was then. Sincerely Yours is Hosono’s album for now. Once again, it is a dual-faced collection of music. But rather than looking out and in at the same time, it looks backward and forward. As a précis of Hosono’s past work and interests, it is very effective—a neat sliver of a record, running to only half an hour, and the way the songs slip smoothly into each other belies just how eclectic it actually is. As always with Hosono’s work, this is a wildly varied LP, borrowing from fifties doo-wop, freak folk, bossa nova, Beethoven, Liszt—a seemingly endless list whose only real connection is their artist. But that is not to say it is haphazard. The intention behind Yours Sincerely is audibly one of self-reflection, an attempt by Hosono to distill himself as much as he can without failing to break new ground. Hosono described two worlds within him, but what this music demonstrates is that that number is closer to hundreds of worlds: he has in his past been a pop singer, a rock star, a folk musician, a techno wizard. Here, he repeats these tricks of transmutation with each track. Sometimes he does so while utilizing a familiar formula as a starting point. Album closer “Anemo Wheel,” for instance, leans heavily on Hosono’s evergreen interest in electronic music. Sparse synth lines seem to potter around their sonic landscape, creating a track that is a cross between the soundtrack to a futuristic fairground ride and a nineties videogame. “Note of Mothership,” the opening track, makes use of synths, too, but as the foundation for other sounds that attract your attention faster: chanting vocals, a looped guitar riff, the sound of a ticking clock that morphs into light drumming. As his back catalog shows, Hosono’s ear is liable to be attracted by anything and everything, and this restlessness is on Yours Sincerely, too, though arguably more restrained than it has been before. “M for Mandala” offers a trippy fusion of instruments and modes, a tabla bubbling underneath Hosono’s distorted vocals and a floating synth line. Though much of this album has the tone of a more “ambient” record, its highlights come from Hosono’s skill at manipulating and molding melody. Both “Sincerely” and “Figlio Perduto” are covers of a sort, though one hesitates to label them as such; so inventive are they with the building blocks they have used. “Figlio Perduto,” for instance, finds its starting point within the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, then quickly draws out the folk elements underpinning the melody and amplifies them. The result is a haunting ballad, with classical guitar and marimba intertwining delicately as vocalists Ikuko Harada and Manami Kakudo perform a staccato chorus. On “Sincerely,” Hosono reworks the 1954 song by the Moonglows, creating a smooth, easy-listening piece replete with Pacific Island-inflected instrumentation. Immediately after comes “Ayurveda,” which displays a similar interest, echoing the style that Hosono first explored on albums like Tropical Dandy back in 1975. Occasionally, some of these songs sound like hollow echoes of Hosono’s rich discography. Where his songs might have been wry and biting (as on “Sports Men”), invigoratingly futuristic (as on “Cosmic Surfin’”), or just plain weird, Yours Sincerely is less antsy, more content to drift and linger in its own sound. As a result, parts of the album feel pared down, occasionally directionless. “Humming (Dream of Love)”, another interpretation of a classical piece, this time Liszt’s Liebesträume No.3, is a lovely listen, but played on guitar and music box it loses the elegant fluidity of the original, becoming more plodding and a tad twee. On tracks like “To A Wild Rose,” we lose Hosono entirely, with guest vocalists or collaborators filling in. It can feel a poor trade-off, because there is simply no one like Haruomi Hosono, with such a clever ear and lofty ambitions. Perhaps Yours Sincerely sets his sights a little lower, but we may forgive him for it. The music remains a wonderful, soothing trip into his worlds—a traversal of entire sound universes with their creator as your guide. [Ghostly International] Mariam Abdel-Razek is a writer and critic based in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm, and Varsity.