This Rest Room concept led us to the creation of our first Music for Rest Rooms iteration, a collaboration with pianist Yumiko Morioka, who has carved out a unique career that spans being a pioneer of Japanese ambient music in the 1980s through to becoming a successful and celebrated boutique truffle maker.  

Yumiko has recently made her own shift to a Rest Room, having moved out of Central Tokyo to the rural wilderness of Oniishi in Gunma Prefecture, and lives surrounded by the natural beauty of forests, lakes, open skies, and dramatic valleys. 

We took a research trip up there to investigate how her new daily rhythms and interactions were affecting her outlook, her creative process, her imagination, and her music. 

What followed was a journey through a series of moments shared in particular locations around the area. 

River-side picnics in a sun-drenched valley surrounded by the hum of summer cicadas, forest wildflower picking, encounters with friends living up a very remote mountain track on a small farm, playing conch shells and across mountain valleys and making Japanese instruments, and the huge deep lake directly across from Yumiko’s large home’s veranda at sunset. 

The sounds of these visits–fragments of birds, water, footsteps, laughter, air, conversations, and shared experiences–were recorded, and the content became a series of sonic “moments” that aligned with images and words spoken, to create a series of 5 moments that we drafted into a graphic score and got together to interpret in the studio.

Over the course of a few group sessions and edits, what gradually emerged was a strong connection between the content included in each of the 5 moments and our own personal memories of them, which we found we could share and tell in relation to scent and taste, as well as through sound. 

We found that though sound is a powerful tool for evoking memory and emotion, when we combined it with the direct hit of a scent, and a tastebud explosion, we could communicate in a language that was less abstract and whose intention was immediately clear – actually strengthening the message of what we wanted to communicate in the abstractness of the sounds. 

This circled back to Yumiko’s own transition as a musician working with food, and we imagined creating our menu of sonic memories and solace as though it were a menu for an exclusive collection of chocolates, or truffles, each with their own corresponding Japanese character and description. Together, they suggested an expanded palette for mental rest: not just sound, but multisensory memory, nostalgia, and place.

"The process of realizing our musical score with Yumiko in the studio was one that relied a lot on playing with texture and timbre. For example, I wanted to place the microphones in such a way not just to get the usual piano sound, but to pick up on the percussive hits of the hammers, and on the way the structure of the piano itself echoes and holds vibrations, so we used a range of contact microphones, and a Sennheiser 416 [usually a dialogue booming microphone] right up against the strings inside the piano, alongside the more conventional setup."
- James Greer

At Wonderfruit, we circled back on the original concept and project name by presenting the final journey into the 5 moments of Music for Rest Rooms, using speakers placed within a number of the restrooms [toilet facilities] onsite. 

What could have potentially been dismissed as a novelty, or missed in the buzz of so much going on, became for many a surprisingly intimate and reflective encounter with an unexpectedly memorable moment, and a space everyone normally rushes through became somewhere to breathe. If anything it meant they stayed longer than they should have.

Visitors commented on feeling unexpectedly cared for and how the connections to real-world sounds, and the rest rooms concept subtly changed their experience of a fundamentally functional space.

For us, this activation validated two of our directions with the Music for Rest Rooms concept.

1. Even small, overlooked rooms can become sites of dignity and rest with the right sonic attention

2. Site-specificity matters: sounds born of real locations and rhythms can carry a different weight than anonymous stock audio