forgot reef number

Metoronori ("metro rider") is Tokyo musician Hikari Matsuda, making improvised, home-recorded experimental pop since 2011, previously on Virgin Babylon, Orange Milk and Glossy Mistakes. forgot reef number is her first LP since Evenings (2022): eight songs of voice, synths and room noise, recorded around the Chiba coastline where she lives. 200 copies, 140g black vinyl, Pantone-printed sleeve with insert.

The title forgot reef number emerges from a play on words: in Japanese, 暗礁 (reef, anshō) and the first half of 暗証番号 (PIN, anshō-bangō) are homophones. Like walking along a shoreline, half-remembering a coral reef, noticing small things that have drifted in.

On land, forgetting your PIN—losing access to your cash card—means being cut off from the systems that hold daily life together. But the losses truly worth mourning are those that have already become harder to perceive: quieter, and yet still present, still calling out. The walker finds an old coin, half-buried in the sand.

I—Metoronori Hikari—was given a coin as change from a vending machine after a friend bought a juice. A commemorative coin from Chiba Prefecture. On it was drawn the coastline of the sea where I live.

I felt a thin, ghostly thread connecting me to the cries that remain in this land. Films, stones, words—I touch them, but their shapes blur with each passing day.

The walker in this album travels a different path.
Perhaps a double of me. And yet—
In 夜風・Shellfish Cuisine, they go to a restaurant. In lights of the bay, they ride a ferry or a large boat. Hall is a sudden arrival in a space where sound echoes.
We meet. But darkness presses down, words lose their meaning, and we fall silent.
Still, I try to speak.
A small voice bounces back.
The voice became a voice that exists with the space itself.