"Stella Mirus"means"mysterious Star" in Latin. Just like its name, the unit`s album "Air" let us feel a mysterious kind of spirituality.
The multiple recordings of chorus one on top of another, each tone painstakingly woven into a tapestry of sounds and the pleasant sounds of the melody with words chosen for their musical
resonance are like the singing of the star filled sky, or mother`s heartbeats heard in the womb, bringing ease to the heart and enfolding us in a sort of a sacred warmth.
The music that is recorded in the work "Air" are nine pieces in all. And within these, five pieces are classics including Bach`s "Air"(For the G string), Beethoven`s "Sonate fur Klavier Nr.14" and Mussorgsky`s "Tableaux Dune Exposition". These pieces that have been selected are all music that everyone has heard somewhere sometime.
As for the other 4 pieces, starting with "Awuamarin" used as Shiseido`s CM music on the radio, they are all originals by a member of Stella Mirus, Eri Sugai who was in charge of producing, arrangement and chorus for the album.
Stella mirus is a unit made up of producer Kazumasa Yoshioka and composer & singer Eri Sugai and they have come up with two important concepts regarding the production of the present album..
one is to express the parts of the instruments and orchestration as much as possible with the human voice. The other is to pursue word as sounds that bring out the beauty of the melodies. Based on these concepts, Eri chose the classical music, coined new words and made multiple recordings all on her own in order to stress the importance of the homogeneity of the voice and so completed the work,
What is particular to this pice is usage of coined word such as those found in "Aria of the G string.
The words do not belong to any country and have no meaning on their own but the melodies which originally had no words spoke vibarantly to the lisners due to the existence of these newly coined words, and these certainly expanded the world created by the piece.
One could say that "AIR", the first album by Stella Mirus, in addition to the beauty of its harmony, refinement of melody, and its perfect popularity, is an album that goes beyond the limitation of words and gives 100%freedom to the expression of spirituality in music and sensitivty of the mind.

[from CD comment pacific garden]