In 2021 Shuta Hiraki found himself entrenched in his own neighbourhood in Nagasaki, Japan due to severe Covid-19 restrictions. Spurred both partly out of inertia and a self-reflective bout, he decided to reinvestigate as well as capture his immediate surrounding through recording sound. This would soon include everything from environmental sounds, film snippets and classical instruments, to a nearby radio tower and various found records, such as some from the Nagasaki Sound-bath museum or ones found in an old shed that had once belong to his mother. Thus with each journey, he was led to the discovery of yet another musical footnote that then found itself stored away on his hard drive.

After amassing a sizable sound archive of recorded material, Shuta left all recordings untouched and undocumented for over a year, as his gaze soon drifted outwards again with the eventual lifting of restrictions.

In 2022, he then began retracing his own steps, and while sifting through his barrage of recordings, something interesting happened; he soon found himself having difficulty placing many of the (mostly unlabelled) sound sources within their recorded context – things that had perhaps once had definite meaning now felt foreign, while other recordings held evident memories of a specific place or time. Enticed by this circumstance, he began meticulously weaving a new, subjective reality, one in which personal sonic remnants converged with unidentifiable samples and foreign sounds. This process then ultimately culminated in the album ‘A Wanderer’. Through its anthropological themes and fragmented process, 'A Wanderer' reflects on the imperfection of life itself, with its music existing somewhere between a series of recent recollections, and the frayed fabric of past lives.