Solo Piano Akira Kosemura

• Akira Kosemura (b. 1985):
• 1 Spring Night Rain - Main Title Theme (From "Meet Me After School") 04:36
• 2 Akira's Theme (From "Meet Me After School") 02:46
• 3 Fragments of the Last Will - Main Theme 01:47
• 4 Hikari - Satoko and Kiyokazu (From "True Mothers") 03:51
• 5 Honey Lemon Soda - Main Theme 02:48
• 6 Our Promise - Kazumasa & Miwa's Theme (From "The Boy and the Dog") 02:05
• 7 Sparkle (Short Version / From "Blue Orchestra") 01:12
• 8 Snowdrop 01:40
• 9 Elegy 04:08
• 10 Lament 02:29
• 11 A Plan with Determination (From "Fragments of the Last Will") 02:25
• 12 Distant Memory (Slow Version / From "Blue Orchestra") 01:31
• 13 Mimosa, Spring Tenderness 03:23
• 14 Angel's Tears 03:26
• 15 Imagine 02:51
• Total Runtime 40:58

Info for Solo Piano

Akira Kosemura, a composer and pianist active on the world stage who boasts global streaming numbers in the classical and contemporary genres, has released his new album, "Solo Piano", on the prestigious Decca Records label!

This marks her first new solo piano album in three years, following "SEASONS", released in 2023. In addition to self-covers of original compositions she wrote for films, TV dramas, and anime, the album also features new tracks. Recorded entirely on a single upright piano, this album brings out the essential beauty of the music and weaves an intimate dialogue between Kosemura's "past" and "present."

The album features solo piano versions?offering fresh interpretations?of songs he provided for acclaimed works such as the films "With Love from Lageri", "The Morning Comes", and "The Boy and the Dog"; the TV drama "Chugakusei Nikki" and the anime series "Honey Lemon Soda" and "Blue Orchestra", as well as newly composed tracks.

For this album, he personally curated songs and recordings that hold deep personal significance to him, using the piano?a uniquely expressive medium?to reflect on his musical journey.

Through these stripped-down solo performances, familiar songs are imbued with new life, creating a world filled with tranquility and deep contemplation that bridges the past and the present.

In 2025, Kosemura released the ambitious album "MIRAI", featuring seven guest vocalists, including Devendra Banhart and Miyuki Hatakeyama. In 2026, he followed that up with "Reach For NAGA", a collaborative work with sound engineer Hiroshi Iguchi. And with this latest release, "Solo Piano", he once again turns his attention to the piano?the very foundation of his music?delivering an extremely personal recording that encapsulates his entire career.

Akira Kosemura, piano

Akira Kosemura
When Akira Kosemura started making music, it was a kind of therapy during his difficult time in his early 20s. He carried an audio recorder to capture the soundscape he encountered, and those field recordings inspired him to create music with his piano. “My original reason for making it, after all, was to heal myself, a kind of rehabilitation technique and it is still part of my everyday life, or perhaps an extension of it. It’s like breathing for me” he recalls.

Since his record debut in 2007, Kosemura’s compositions have been reflecting his inner voice, and drawing various images silently and beautifully – from quiet nights, four seasons, to some stories about unknown people in unknown world. He garnered attention worldwide, collaborated with notable musicians such as John Legend and Devendra Banhart, and created scores for films/TV drama/video games like the Cannes featured film True Mothers (2020), Hollywood produced drama series Love Is__ (2018), the Nintendo Switch game Jack Jeanne (2021), TV anime Honey Lemon Soda (2025), and so many others. Completely self-taught composer/pianist has become one of the most streamed Asian classical artists, has signed Decca Records/Universal Music in 2022, and released diverse records including his renowned solo piano album, SEASONS (2023).

Now in 2025, Kosemura looks at a new direction. MIRAI (means “future” in Japanese) is his first-ever vocal project album featuring 7 notable singers – Devendra Banhart, Mr Hudson, Baths, Benjamin Gustafsson, Saro, Tom Adams, and Miyuki Hatakeyama.

“I came up with this project as I felt a sense of division during the COVID pandemic” says Kosemura. As a father raising his son, his focus on making music has been shifted from his inner voices to the message for next generations, and he decided to set the concept of this record to describe the future from his personal perspective with music, for future era.

Based on his background and experiences as a Japanese and composer, MIRAI unites various elements from Asian traditional instruments, film soundtrack to post-rock, neo-classical and electronica, in his one-of-a-kind musicality and several languages, just like post-war Japanese culture developed uniquely with the influence from western countries. The result is so colorful – we can hear the influences from post-rock such as Mogwai and Sigur Ros on ‘Atlas’ featuring Tom Adams, see ambient worlds featuring field recordings of songs of Nagas in Myanmar on ‘SECAI’ and ‘Lore’, and feel gentle winds in the mountains on ‘Autumn Moon’ featuring Miyuki Hatakeyama, which lyrics are cited from Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a classical Japanese anthology of one hundred Japanese waka by one hundred poets.

Says Kosemura, “It was a great time for me to be able to bring out the various musical elements that influenced me from my young age to the present and incorporate them one by one into the album. We would travel diverse worlds through the record, and it ends with utopian Japanese music. I wrote the last track ‘Ongaku’ with the image of a Japanese festival that doesn’t actually exist. The ending of the song is also a little fantastical, with the sound flying off somewhere, as it is intended to be listened to again by going back to the first song.”

“This is very different to SEASONS. This looks at the world from a very different perspective” says the composer. Featuring various instruments such as dilruba, erhu, shakuhachi, koto, shamisen and many others, MIRAI is his phantasmal statement for the future, as well as his journey to the utopia of music.

“It feels impossible to get tired of, circumscribed and boundless at once.” -Pitchfork

“Fantastic stuff.” - Gilles Peterson

“Peaceful, evocative music” - Fact Magazine

This album contains no booklet.