Flora

What sets Hiroshi Yoshimura’s music apart from the endless cascade of ambient/electronic/New Age reissues is its sense of size: No matter how deep the mood, everything he made sounds like it could fit in the palm of your hand—cosmic music on a toylike scale. Recorded in 1987 after the essential Surround and Green, 1987’s Flora is easily the sweetest music he ever made but also the most emotionally appealing, a drifty daydream of naive melodies (“Over the Clover,” “Maple Syrup Factory”) and auditory dioramas (“Asagao,” “Wind Echo”) with just of a sense of mystery to save them from being saccharine.