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Over the past few years, alto sax player Masahiko Okura has led an astonishingly full and varied musical life. Active as a soloist, as leader of the jazz-rock band Gnu, and as a member of the improvisational trio Bject (with Tetuzi Akiyama and Utah Kawasaki), he also collaborates with many other improvisers, including Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Ami Yoshida, Axel Dörner, Alessandro Bosetti, Werner Dafeldecker, and Günter Müller. With the recent addition to his repertoire of two more instrume…
Funny rat
Free jazz drummer Shoji Hano and German saxophone giant-leading European free improviser Peter Brotzmann first met in Japan in the early eighties. In 1990 Hano went to Europe for the first time and played with Brötzmann; then he invited Brotzmann to Japan for a duo tour in fall '91. This album is the complete recording of a concert they gave during that tour, at Aku Aku in Tsukuba. In '92 Hano released (on his label EGG) a cassette tape of that performance, with the same title, omitting one of t…
In case of fire take the stairs
Kaffe Matthews (laptop), Andrea Neumann (inside piano), Sachiko M (sinewaves, contact microphones). Recorded live in Tokyo, 3/17/02. Although I and II include two and three tracks, respectively, each is a single work. They are divided into multiple tracks for listeners' convenience. Kaffe Matthews created her sound by live-sampling and processing her own and the other musicians' sounds as they played.
Across the desert
European free jazz/free improvisation pioneer Han Bennink (drums) made this studio recording with Kazuo Imai (guitar) in Tokyo in May of 2002. Imai, who in the '70s studied with Masayuki Takayanagi and Takehisa Kosugi, currently performs both on his own and with the annual five-member collective improvisation project Marginal Consort. Across the Desert contains nine duo pieces. Imai plays both acoustic and electric guitar while Bennink delivers strong, constantly changing rhythms. Here are two m…
Live in Australia
Taku Sugimoto is an extremely restrained guitarist who produces very few sounds in performance, allowing silence to be the controlling force. As an improviser and composer, he's garnered international acclaim, and also provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative. This two-CD set documents Sugimoto's live performances, in Australia in September 2003, of two of his own compositions (one per CD): 'Dot (73)' and 'Music for Amplified Guitar.' Environmental sounds -- listeners' coughs, foots…
Oimacta
Tetuzi Akiyama has in recent years attracted tremendous interest on the Japanese and international improvised music scenes. In addition to performing many times in Europe, America, Australia, and New Zealand, he's been releasing a steady stream of solo and group recordings on these countries' labels. Oimacta, a duo album he recorded in a Sydney studio with Martin Ng (turntable feedback), promises to become one of his most widely recognized works. Akiyama's instrument here is the acoustic guitar.…
Side guitar
Toshimaru Nakamura's main instrument of late has been what he calls the 'no-input mixing board.' Rather than input external sound sources into the mixer, he treats it as a self-contained instrument by controlling its internal feedback -- the result being a truly original performance style. Over the past four years, Nakamura has released the solo NIMB CDs No-Input Mixing Board (on the Zero Gravity label), No-Input Mixing Board 2 (a bruit secret), Vehicle (cubic music), and No-Input Mixing Board […
Loose Community
Otomo Yoshide (turntables, guitar) is active on a worldwide scale in such fields as free improvisation, composition, and film music. On a trip to Seoul in May of 2002, Otomo made a studio recording with Seoul musicians Park Je Chun (percussion) and Mi Yeon (piano). Known as a brilliant student of Kang Tae Hwan, the pioneer of the Korean improvised music scene, Park was formerly a member of Kang's band. Mi Yeon, an artist firmly grounded in contemporary classical music, has collaborated with Park…
Ensemble Cathode
Taku Sugimoto: electric guitar, Tetuzi Akiyama: turntable without records, contact microphones, Yasuhiro Yoshigaki: waterphone, Kumiko Takara: snare drum, Masahiro Uemura: bells, Ami Yoshida: voice, Itoken: crotales, Mari Furuta: snare drum, Yoshimitsu Ichiraku: cymbal with bow, Sachiko M: sine waves, contact microphone, Yoko Nishi: prepared 17-string koto, Andrea Neumann: inside piano, Yoshihide Otomo: turntable. This album was recorded intermittently between May 2001 and March 2002. Most of th…
Molecules
Limited edition of 400. This masterful performance was born of the meeting of two master improvisers, Kazuo Imai from Japan and Roger Turner from the UK. Imai, who studied with Masayuki Takayanagi and Takehisa Kosugi, is one of Japan's leading improvisers and guitarists. Turner is a drummer and percussionist who has been actively performing throughout the world since the beginning of the 1970s. His Japan tour in October 2017 included concerts with Japanese musicians in various locations, includi…
A Group for Experimental Music
In the mid 1960’s, there was a collective of contemporary musicians in Osaka, called Art Zyklus. Because Hajime Yamashita, one of the core members, had sold a part of his privately stored sound source over the Internet, the whole picture of amazing and completely unknown activities was revealed. The release compiled works created by Art Zyklus as well as Yamashita. Worth mentioning is that ‘Music for Electric Metronomes’ by Toshi Ichiyanagi was premiered in Japan. Apart from that, the fact that …
Imaginations of Light + Hallo Rabbit
This fine double LP release combines two full-length albums from the German acid/kraut-folk duo Flute & Voice, which was formed by Mannheim-based multi-instrumentalists Hans Reffert ('Flute') and Hans Brandeis ('Voice'). The debut-LP 'Imaginations Of Light', originally released in 1970 by the legendary Pilz label, features wonderful trippy and progressive folk music with ethnic and even jazzy elements. This LP should appeal to fans of fellow Germans s.a. Witthueser & Westrup and Bröselmaschine, …
L'Envol
*In process of stocking. 300 copies limited edition* In his youth days, Gontran lived on the road. He describes himself as a member of the alternative hippie generation, not of those who claimed wanted to change the world, but of those who actually took an alternate way of living. He travelled, took any jobs available to make some money to live wherever he was, and wrote beautiful songs accompaining himself on guitar. From time to time, when the stars aligned, when there was the chance, he would…
Shikisokuzekuu-Kuusokuzeshiki
The details of Shikisokuzekuu-Kuusokuzeshiki (1964) are unknown except that it was created at the NHK electronic music studio. According to Toshi Ichiyanagi, there were various discussions about the title, but it would seem to have been eventually broadcasted on the radio with the title Kuu after a producer renamed it. Here, the original title is used, following Ichiyanagi's initial intention. This work has no relation to the short experimental film Shikisokuzekuu (1974), produced by filmmaker T…
Obscure Tape Music of Japan, Vol. 19: Kumo no Ito (The Spider's Thread)
"Kumo no Ito" (trans. "The Spider's Thread): "In 1977 I started the project of a musical piece for a female narrator and 4-channel electronic sounds using the text of the well-known Akutagawa novel. I worked with a hand-made analog synthesizer which had been installed two years before in my home studio in Tokyo. Needless to say, the editing was done without digital machines. I worked with the recorded tapes together with scissors and splicing tape. It was the resonance-adding apparatus tha…
Echoes
*2022 stock* "'Emerald Tablet' was recorded at the NHK electronic-music studio in 1978. It is made up of only the sonic ingredients of a tubular bell, cymbals, and 'kin,' a largish-sized bell used for Buddhist memorial services in Japan. The attack of the sound of each instrument was eliminated, and the work was taped through repeated overdubbing. This produced a variety of beautiful harmonics that otherwise could not be produced from a single instrument's sound, and the interference of harmonic…
Radiated Falling. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 11
Mamoru Fujieda is a Japanese post-minimalist composer, and Edition Omega Point releases some of his work from the early '80s. Both "Radiated Falling" (1980) and "The Art Of Fugue" (1981) are tape compositions in which sound materials of a prepared piano are electronically-processed and modulated in various ways. "Radiated Falling" is based on "Falling Scale No. 2" for piano (1975). The series of works entitled "Falling Scale" are composed almost entirely of descending scales as their stru…
Music for experimental films. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 7
This is volume 7 of Omega Point's Obscure Tape Music of Japan series. Many avant-garde composers made soundtracks for experimental film-maker Toshio Matsumoto. This CD consists of Joji Yuasa's three musique concrète works for his 1960s and 1970s short films. The first track features a heavily broken and meaningless narrator for the short film Andy Warhol: Re-Reproduction (1974); "Document Of The Long White Line" is an obscure, early electronic sound collage with chamber orchestra, and "Auto…
Tape Works of Kuniharu Akiyama. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 006
Kuniharu Akiyama (1929-1996) was well-known as a music critic, mainly of modern and contemporary music. However, his career was not only in the music field -- he was also a very well-regarded avant-garde artist (he especially related to the early Fluxus movement). This release consists of his three unknown tape music pieces. They are very strange. Excerpt from the liner notes: "'Environmental Mechanical Orchestra' (1966) was made for an exhibition called 'From Space to Environment,' carried out …
Music for theatrical drama. Obscure Tape Music Of Japan – Vol.4
This is volume 4 of Omega Point's newly-reissued Obscure Tape Music of Japan series, featuring two early works of music concrète composed for theatrical drama by legendary Japanese composer Joji Yuasa. The sounds on this recording, especially of "Oen" is so experimental and strange, but this music was not for avant-garde theater. "Mittsu No Sekai" contains elements of a mechanical beat (suggestive of a machine civilization) that could be the precursor to industrial music. Composed for the …