Hello!
I am a big fan of Joe Hisaishi, so being called "Joe Hisaishi with a modern twist" is an incredible compliment! (Honestly, I think that might have to become the media blurb on my website now!)
The music influences are mostly from Indonesia/Japan (I listed some of the inspiration in the composer notes above), although to be honest I'm not too familiar with slavic music so it is possible there are some relations to that as well - I'll look into it some more though later, seems like it could be interesting music to study.
I did only use SoundFonts! I love SoundFonts and have a pretty big collection and have a lot of favorites that I have amassed over the years; I have done some work in the past with Japanese instruments so I wanted to use them again as the artwork for this jam was from Japan. And I pay a lot of attention to the details of the EQ and mixing, LMMS has a lot of built in effects tools to help with that. I don't use any VSTs in this and I also don't use very many VSTs in general, largely because I'm mostly on my mac laptop and a lot of the times VSTs are windows only.
Yes, I use LMMS - I'm using a custom skin called candy aurora. I've been using LMMS for like 17 years at this point; I'm getting Old >_>.
Thanks for such thoughtful feedback and for taking the time to listen!