ermhoi – IN-BETWEEN (PAN 168)

For the last decade, Irish-Japanese artist ermhoi has been steadily refining her distinct musical signature, a sound that’s rooted in electronic music’s relative open mindedness, but takes just as much influence from classical music, ambient and pop. ‘In-Between’ is her most ambitious endeavor to date, a billowing electroacoustic soundtrack that balances its noisy backdrop of glitches, digital textures and syrupy synths with the splendor of a string ensemble (made up of violinists Yuri Kamei and Tomohiro Ishii, viola player Mei Mishina, cellist Sonoko Muraoka and contrabass player Marty Holoubek) and the rhythmelodic impetus of acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Taikimen’s marimba sequences.

The album materialized after ermhoi was commissioned to compose a track for a video work presented at the Japan Pavilion of the International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2025. And when the work traveled home earlier this year for a presentation at Kyoto City’s KYOCERA Museum of Art, ermhoi reconstructed her original score, reconsidering the cues to provide a fully developed album that could exist in its own universe. It’s the culmination of years of experience that ermhoi has accumulated over the years, working as a composer for film, television and installation art and as a live performer as well as developing her acclaimed solo full-lengths.

Her first album, ‘Junior Refugee’, was released in 2015 and since then ermhoi has worked outside of genre’s rigid borders, blending her wide spectrum of influences on records like 2021’s ‘Dream Land’ and 2024’s ‘Junebug Rhapsody’, when she revisited the ideas approached on her debut. On ‘In-Between’, she surveys all of this work, carefully and intricately weaving her gentle electronic processes through sophisticated orchestral arrangements. Her soundscape comes to life on the ambiguous ‘Paradise?’, when restrained environmental elements and pitch-mangled synths are juxtaposed with pristine string flourishes. And that unexpected fusion continues to surprise on ‘Outside’, with its romantic, sweeping phrases and deceptively jazzy bass plucks.

The climate shifts significantly on ‘Why do humans occupy land?’ when ermhoi introduces rougher, more digital sounds into her backdrop of evocative drones and the album reaches its celestial apex on ‘Inside’, seemingly referencing Japan’s influential “kankyō ongaku” scene with its malleable processed marimba’s. But ermhoi refuses to chain herself to a single expression for more than moments, sailing into choppier waters on the precarious ‘Rotation’ and letting each musical thread knot into a perfect chamber pop tapestry on the impressively dense title track. It’s a track that contextualizes the entire album, showing in a matter of minutes just why she’s been so in demand.