★Ftarri
Idiophonic
Seijiro Murayama (percussion, voice) lived in France for many years and is currently based in Paris. Alto sax player Jean Luc Guionnet, who lives in Paris, is also known as a pipe organist. The two musicians have released three CDs to date: Le Bruit du Toit (Xing-Wu Records, 2007), Window Dressing (Potlatch, 2011), and Mishima, Day & Night (Ftarri, 2015). Guionnet played the sax on each of these albums. Their fourth release, Idiophonic, is the first on which Murayama performs with Guionnet the o…
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…
Land of the Hermits
Improviser/composer Hiroyuki Ura, sculptor Kenichi Kanazawa, and classical pianist Satoko Inoue released two CDs on the Meenna label in 2017, and the three artists are united again in Hermits. The earlier CDs, Scores and Scores at Ftarri (both released in 2017), are made up of their live performances of a composition by Ura, which was based on a sculptural work by Kanazawa. The performance heard on Scores took place at The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, in October 2016; the performance on Scores a…
Scores at Ftarri
It’s been five years since Ftarri, an online CD shop and record label specializing in improvised music, opened a physical store of the same name in Suidobashi, Tokyo. This is the fourth title in a four-CD series celebrating the store's fifth anniversary. "Scores 1200," the CD's 60-minute track, is a composed work by Hiroyuki Ura based on a sculpture by Kenichi Kanazawa. A live performance by the trio of Kanazawa (steel square tubes, hammer), Ura (VSS-30 sampling keyboard, drums) and pianis…
Listening to the Footsteps of Living Ones Who Are Still on the G
This is a duo album by Toshimaru Nakamura, a mixer player based in Tokyo, and Martin Taxt, a tuba player living in Oslo. Instead of a conventional tuba, Taxt plays a custom-made “microtonal tuba” capable of producing microtones. In this album, Nakamura incorporates Taxt’s tuba sounds in his mixer through a microphone instead of playing his usual instrument, the no-input mixing board, which does not take in external sounds. The project started with the concept of Nakamura processing the tub…
Hello
Takahiro Kawaguchi began making field recordings and performing improvised music in 2000, and in recent years has attracted a great deal of attention as a sound artist. In January 2009 he released, on Taku Unami's label Hibari Music, the solo album n, on which he uses several remodeled counters. Shinjiro Yamaguchi, born in 1983, is an electronic music player. in October 2008 he released the minimal ambient solo album Kogai on the Japanese label Cherry Music.This is the debut album of Kawaguchi a…