Out now Piano Distance — NAKAMURA Hiroyuki
A single piano, listened to at its edges — where a tone begins, where it disappears, and the space that holds both.
Recorded between the note and the room it crosses.
Cover
Listen
Hear the whole album
Full album streaming on Bandcamp. Or open it on your platform of choice.
Passage
Piano Distance listens to what happens at the edges of sound — the moment a piano tone begins, the long slope of its disappearance, and the space that holds both.
After Takemitsu — a question about distance
After Takemitsu, a question about distance.
The title cites Tōru Takemitsu's 1961 piano piece of the same name — and takes up his lifelong question of distance: between piano and listener, between sound and silence. Piano Distance asks it again through binaural recording and a self-built spatial-audio system.
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The title is a deliberate citation of Toru Takemitsu's 1961 piano work of the same name — a tribute to a composer who, throughout his life, kept asking what distance meant: between piano and listener, between performer and room, between sound and silence. Piano Distance takes up that question with the tools of binaural recording and a self-built spatial-audio system, and with a certain urgency particular to our time: in an information environment that prefers the loud and the close, what slower kinds of attention might still be possible?
Tracklist
30-second previews below. Track 01 streams in full on Bandcamp. Headphones recommended.
- 01 Subglacial Trace 6:39
Notes
A slow pressure beneath the surface: low resonance, close air, the feeling of depth before form.
- 02 Meltwater Stillness 3:5530-sec preview
Notes
Liquid quietness: tones suspended as if drifting, reflections folding into one another.
- 03 Between Vanishing Notes 6:4230-sec preview
Notes
The album's core gesture: decay as structure; silence as a measurable distance.
- 04 White Flash in Still Air 3:5930-sec preview
Notes
Brief glare and edge: bright transients, sudden nearness, then retreat.
- 05 Folded Hours in Frost 6:4230-sec preview
Notes
Time bends inward: repetitions that feel like memory, held under a thin layer of cold.
- 06 Pale Modes Adrift 5:3030-sec preview
Notes
Modal drift and suspension: the sense of direction loosening, yet never dissolving.
- 07 Remote Ritual of Light 6:4230-sec preview
Notes
A distant ceremony: sparse figures, bell-like harmonics, an aura of far-off warmth.
- 08 Residual Echoes of Ice 4:4430-sec preview
Notes
Afterimage: what remains when the source is gone — space as the final cadence.
Total44:53
Music videos
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02 Meltwater Stillness
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04 White Flash in Still Air
Passages
Our hearing is older than clarity — tied to the instinct to detect where something is, how close, how safe.
The work can feel tender and uneasy at once; a bright figure arrives too close, a resonance recedes until it becomes the room.
How it was made
Two speakers. The room does the rest.
Our hearing is older than clarity — tied to the instinct to detect where something is, how close, how safe. The album was composed by listening to that older hearing: a single piano, distributed in air, arriving from behind the listener, from above, from inside the room. No surround rig, no array — just the small grammar of two speakers and the way a tone enters a space.
Live · Distant Echo
Piano Distance, brought into a room.
2025 · Tokyo Distant Echo is the worldview of Piano Distance realised as a site-specific installation-concert — the album's sense of distance, decay and the space-between-sounds, brought into a room. First presented in 2025 at Kiba Earth+ Gallery (Tokyo).
The audience's position and movement become part of the piece's mix; the same spatial-audio system survives outside headphones, on just two speakers, with no surround rig. Live piano with paper / foil visual work by Maria Noto.
Stage 
Audience 
Maria Noto · paper 
Piano · live 
Resonance 
Foil 
Quiet Critical context — review of Distant Echo (Tokyo, 2025)
“Extremely meticulous and structural … high temporal resolution.”
“Feels like binaural through speakers.”
— Takayama Hiroshi (高山博氏), writing about Distant Echo (Tokyo, 2025).
Just to be clear: this is a quote from a review of the 2025 installation, not of the Piano Distance album itself.
Artist
Tokyo / Kawasaki NAKAMURA Hiroyuki — composer and pianist who treats sound as space.
NAKAMURA Hiroyuki is a Tokyo/Kawasaki-based composer and pianist whose work treats sound as space — how a sound holds the room it crosses, the distance between a note and its listener. Trained as a pianist, he builds his own spatial-audio systems and composes across recordings, site-specific installation and performance.
His spatial sound has been used by the London art collective Random International (Alone Together, Superblue Miami / Riyadh Art) and underpins the UK theatre work DEEP FAKE — Ghost in the Machine (supported by Arts Council England; with choreographer Rosie Kay; Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 2026). He lectures at the National University of Tainan (Taiwan) and ESP Entertainment Tokyo.
Releases include Piano Distance (Fluid Audio, UK / Beyond Boundary Music, 2026), Sen no Tsudoi (Dragon's Eye, 2024) and Look Up at the Stars (Youngbloods, 2023).
Selected contexts
Random International — Superblue DEEP FAKE — Arts Council England Tama Art University, with Apichatpong Weerasethakul (instructor)