1. Suzuki / Masubuchi duo 24:57
2. Saeki / Sugimoto duo 29:58
3. Saeki / Suzuki / Sugimoto / Masubuchi quartet 30:56
credits
released October 27, 2022
Minami Saeki: voice
Ayami Suzuki: voice
Taku Sugimoto: guitar, mandolin
Takashi Masubuchi: guitar
recorded at Permian, Tokyo, October 2, 2022
recorded by Takashi Masubuchi
mixed by Taku Sugimoto with the help of Ayami Suzuki
Falling back on its own reminiscences and assailed by the anxiety of the future, it seems that Western culture has never really known the present moment: it is, besides, a time that verges on non-existence, constantly stretched between intention and action, and therefore to which, in spite of its very name, one often ends up being absent. On the contrary, it is almost exclusive to the Japanese arts and philosophy to pay attention to the transient and the ineffable, without worrying about what remains but only what is, the always unique and unrepeatable happening of existence.
All this, the reductionist poetics of Taku Sugimoto and his fellow performers does not say, but rather embodies it with every note played or omitted, weighing musical gestures and pauses with the same, most profound care. Improvisation then loses its character of burning impulsiveness, where it is rather thoughtfulness that guides – perhaps as the only inspiring principle – the hermetic and prolonged dialogues between acoustic guitars and female voices, alternating in duo formations and, finally, as a quartet.
Even within such essential expressiveness, simplified to its lowest terms, there are nevertheless stylistic differences and unmistakable characters, like variations on a theme of imperturbable stillness. Indeed, the warm moonlit scenery evoked by Ayami Suzuki and Takashi Masubuchi retains a more lyrical, freely singable afflatus: with a vague and fragmentary pace, the first and last minutes of the opening set delimit a vast contemplative section where time seems to halt on a picture of gleaming harmony, the two performers abandoning themselves to melismas and arpeggios that leave no room for bravura or prevarication, but devote themselves entirely to the outlining of a shared yet indefinable sentiment, open to any ear that may grasp it.
Well known to those who frequent such a singular experimental circle, Minami Saeki and Taku Sugimoto are among the most emblematic figures of the acoustic reductionism that has arisen from the Tokyo underground since the 1990s. In an almost opposite manner to the previous duo, in their enigmatic digression vocal cords and nylon strings become one, a loose fabric of pointillistic tones and syllables, seldom protracted beyond an instant of duration. Sensual without being allusive, Saeki’s vocalisms and whistles have the transparency of a lingua franca without an interlocutor: a naive, even puerile solipsism into which auditory perception happily strays and would perhaps like to appease itself, but which instead remains vivid precisely by virtue of the extraneous fascination that those suspended phonemes are able to exert on the mind so accustomed – and submissive – to full meaning, to words rather than fluid verbal matter.
Lastly, the sum of the parts couldn’t but generate a new ‘whole’: the formal rarefaction spontaneously embraced by the quartet combines the similar sensitivities of its members in a delicate play of mirrors that, if on the one hand seems to mimic, above all, the “disjointed”, perpetually becoming aesthetics of Taku Sugimoto, on the other it does not renounce glissati, resonances and sustains that smooth out its contours, immersing the final set in an atmosphere of airy and disorienting abstraction – an idyll that not even the occasional screeching and dissonance of extended techniques could possibly upset. It’s the sweetest shipwreck imaginable.
