★Ftarri
Songs
The concept of Songs, the duo project of guitarist Taku Sugimoto and vocalist Minami Saeki, came about in the second half of 2016. By that December they had already made recordings of their music, and the following February they released their debut album, Songs (CD), on Sugimoto’s label, slubmusic. Since then, the duo has had an active performance schedule in Japan and overseas, including European tours in 2017 and 2018. Now they have released their second album, the 2-CD set Songs.Most of the …
Duo and Trio
This is the 1st CD release commemorating the 6th anniversary of Ftarri, the CD shop in Suidobashi, Tokyo. Seijiro Murayama, who lives in France, is active mainly in Europe, giving truly original performances using drums, percussion and voice. Toshihiro Koike is a trombone player who lives in Nagoya. He is the leader of the trio Fuigo, whose other members are Kanji Nakao and Takero Sekijima; and he is also a member of the Satoko Fujii Orchestra. His improvised performances freely using expanded p…
Skullmarks
The group Common Objects was formed in 2005 by the British harpist/composer Rhodri Davies. The group has had a fluid membership, but in recent years its core members have been the six musicians performing on this album: John Butcher, Angharad Davies, Lina Lapelyte, Lee Patterson, Pat Thomas, and Rhodri Davies. Common Objects performs a wide range of music, from composed works to improvisation. Skullmarks documents the group’s first project in which objects are used as scores.In 2016 Common Objec…
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…
Taku Sugimoto / Stefan Thut
Guitarist, composer and improviser Taku Sugimoto frequently performs overseas as well as in Japan. He's also a member of the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, which consists of five Japanese musicians. Stefan Thut is a Swiss cellist and composer. Both Sugimoto and Thut are known as unique performers and composers, and both have close ties with the contemporary classical Wandelweiser group. The two have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Jap…
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…
In Doubt We Trust
After a four-year interval, The International Nothing has come out with a new album! The International Nothing is the duo project of Berlin-based clarinetists Kai Fagaschinski and Michal Thieke. Both musicians are well known as improvisers, but in this project they perform their own compositions. The International Nothing’s previous releases, all on the Ftarri label, are the debut album Mainstream (2006); Less Action, Less Excitement, Less Everything (2010); and The Dark Side of Success (2014). …
Whose Words ?
Guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama is an influential improviser who performs inside and outside Japan and has numerous CD releases on Japanese and overseas labels. The five tracks on this CD are improvisational performances by the trio of Akiyama and Swedish musicians Magnus Granberg and Henrik Olsson, studio-recorded when Akiyama visited Stockholm in November 2013. Magnus Granberg is active as a composer through projects such as his own ensemble, Skogen, and as an improviser using mainly the clari…
Downdate
Seijiro Murayama, a percussionist/drummer currently based in Japan, lived in France for a number of years and has received acclaim in the west for his musicianship. He performs frequently both inside and outside Japan. This is Murayama’s first solo album since “Broken Iteration” was released on the Herbal International label four years ago, in 2013. It consists of two tracks of about 20 minutes and one of about 7 minutes (3 in total). Overlapping and combining with percussion and scraping…
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…
Ftarri After Tomorrow
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 first title in a four-CD series celebrating the store's fifth anniversary. It consists of four performances (three solos and one duo) by a total of five musicians. The first track is an electronic sound piece by Hideki Umezawa (born in 1986) in which myriad wriggling, slithering sounds are released little by little …
Quintets: Berlin, San Diego
In recent years, guitarist Taku Sugimoto has been active as a composer, providing works to musicians inside and outside Japan, and also as an improvisational musician. He often works with composers and musicians in the sphere of the Wandelweiser school, and gives many performances overseas. Sugimoto is also a member of the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, which is made up of five Japanese musicians.This CD, Sugimoto’s first release since Septet (on Meenna) in 2015, is made up of two versions, both a…
Ftarri de Solos
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 third title in a four-CD series celebrating the store's fifth anniversary. The two tracks are solo performances by female sound artists who play self-made instruments. Track one is a live performance by suzueri, which took place at Ftarri on March 18, 2017. In addition to self-made instruments, she uses an uprigh…
Ftarri Jam
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 second title in a four-CD series celebrating the store's fifth anniversary. The single 33-minute track is a group improvisation by all five musicians who appeared at Ftarri on May 5, 2017, performed at the end of the concert. Masashi Takashima (drums, electronics), who lives in the city of Koriyama in Fukushima …
Music Performance 'KIYOH'
Yumiko Tanaka is a gidayu shamisen player active in the fields of contemporary classical and improvised music as well as traditional Japanese music. Tanaka performed as a musician and actress in Hashirigaki (premiered in 2000), a music theater production by German composer/director Heiner Goebbels; and created the music for and performed in Dogugaeshi (premiered in 2004), an object theater work by American puppeteer Basil Twist. Based on these experiences, in December 2010 she created, pr…
Immediate Landscapes
Sound artist Akio Suzuki crisscrosses the world with his self-made instruments. British tenor/soprano sax player John Butcher is a leading figure in improvised music. These two musicians have been carrying out duo performances since 2002. The six tracks on this CD are recordings of their duos in Scotland in 2006 and Tokyo in 2015. In June 2006, an event was held in which Suzuki and Butcher visited and performed in places around Scotland that have highly distinctive acoustic characteristics. Butc…
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…
Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble
Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble (SCE), formed in spring 2016 on the initiative of flute player Wakana Ikeda, is a chamber group which periodically performs contemporary/experimental music concerts. The five members are Wakana Ikeda, Yoko Ikeda (viola), Aya Naito (bassoon), Masahiko Okura (clarinet, bass clarinet), and Taku Sugimoto (guitar). In concerts held at Ftarri, Tokyo, in May and July 2016, SCE performed works by the composers of the Wandelweiser group. The five tracks on this album include p…
A Crescent and Moonflowers
The musicians who appeared in the concert at Ftarri, Tokyo, on June 5, 2016, were young improvisers active in the Tokyo area: Straytone (modular synthesizer), Yui Nakamura (voice), Takashi Masubuchi (guitar), and Masahide Tokunaga (alto sax). Three of the musicians (without Nakamura) performed the first set, followed by all four. Each set was a little less than 30 minutes long. This CD consists of those two sets. In both of these superb performances, an indescribable feeling of unity was produce…