Nujabes - Hydeout Productions 1st Collection (23 April 2003)

I saw someone mention this in a comment—my apologies for not remembering your name—and coincidentally found it in one of my stacks of CDs today.

This album is a compilation of songs from Hydeout Productions, a studio founded in 1998 by Jun Seba, better known as Nujabes. It features a combination of collaborations with both domestic and foreign artists, e.g. Shing02 and Substantial, respectively. Nujabes would work with a lot of these artists throughout his career. And in that vein, the album is not strikingly different from anything else in his discography. Cynics can write it off as, “more of the same,” but that’s fine with me since Nujabes belongs to the upper echelon of Japanese hip-op.