I had to throw out my original review of Tatsuhisa Yamamoto’s ano kane wo narasu. In that one I enthused over his superb handling of electronics, marvelling at how he let simple drones build and expand through judicious use of reverb and gain to open up new expanses of tonality and colour throughout the half-hour composition without ever losing a tight focus on the piece’s conceptual foundations. Tonal layers evolve into timbral changes and recede, allowing new sections to emerge with a subtle addition of noise to give the piece an internal motivation. There’s a special skill here, not just in technical management but in musical judgement, in how to let more happen through leaving things alone. Then I read the release notes and, uh, looked at the cover art and well shit-a-brick turns out it’s an album of solo percussion playing, with Yamamoto using bowed cymbals and gongs throughout. So as it happens, there is a whole load of technical skill going on here with Yamamoto maintaining timbral consistency and harmonic momentum, as well as a greater musical discretion in maintaining variety while resisting a larger, distracting range of possible sounds which would otherwise have been technologically proscribed. Recorded as a single performance, some delay system is evidently at work, used to great effect near the end to build up a fascinating, troubling drone of aggregated and compounded tones. However it’s made, it’s a special piece of work.
I’ve told the Taku Sugimoto gig anecdote before, so I’ll refer you to my previous review. That time, as well as his own work, Sugimoto had recorded Bruno Duplant’s lEttEr to tAku in a Park, combining sparse guitar notes with al fresco field recording. He has now recorded his own compositional approach to this soundworld for Takuroku, analytically titled G major (2, 3, 5, 7 / III, IV, V) / VII / G major (2, 3, 5, 7 / III, IV, V). Recorded in two sessions in Tokyo this year, Sugimoto plays electric guitar and, much less actively, acoustic. The amplification is modest, enough to make audible the resonance of the muted harmonics that make up most of Sugimoto’s playing here, in irregularly scattered moments. The city is distant, a faint roar that rises and falls like the surf. There are a few birds in the area, perhaps more if they come and go. The slow pulse of background sound gives a regularity that might have made Sugimoto more (relatively) extroverted here. His guitar playing, while gentle, is more free here than usual, making more of a mark against the lulling backdrop. Where his guitar has previously been present largely through its absence, here the pauses become more of a matter of phrasing. At one time the field recording drops away: still, we can hear something strangely pastoral in the unhurried pacing of the sounds, at odds with the forbidding urban setting and technical contrivances. For now, we can enjoy this for what it is and worry about Sugimoto’s potential slide into stylistic decadence later.
