** Edition of 200 ** Repercussions catches Kakuhan - the duo of electronics artist Koshiro Hino and cellist Yuki Nakagawa - at the exact moment their already volatile language collides with the radical percussion of Polish drummer and musicologist Adam Golebiewski, opening their sound into a new, three-headed creature. First brought together for an Unsound Kraków 2023 performance, the trio’s chemistry proved too explosive to leave as a one-off; soon after the festival they entered KPD Studio with engineer Rafał Drewniany, recording a single, high-intensity session that would be sculpted into this ten-part, 34-minute album. Released jointly by Unsound and Instant Classic, Repercussions extends Kakuhan’s “hybrid electroacoustic music” - already notorious from their debut Metal Zone - into territory where the drumkit becomes both a third voice and a blade, slicing into the duo’s dense ritual with unnerving precision.
Kakuhan’s core vocabulary is a constantly shifting mesh of sampler shock and treated cello: Hino’s “percussive abrasions” popping, panning and cascading in patterns that nod to Autechre as much as to footwork or club deconstruction, while Nakagawa stretches the cello far beyond chamber tropes using echo boxes, effects and extended technique. On Repercussions, those tendencies are amplified. Tracks like “II” and “I” hinge on Hino’s skittering sequences and sub-bass rumbles, but the groove never settles into a grid; instead it flickers around Golebiewski’s rasping cymbal work, intermittent hi-hats and sudden snare detonations, creating a push-pull between human gesture and machine logic. Elsewhere, as on “VII”, rhythmic markers almost evaporate, leaving scraped drones, bowed metal and low-end murmurs to suggest pulse from the edges rather than the centre.
Golebiewski, known for collaborations with Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark and others, brings a fiercely material approach to percussion: cymbals are bowed until they shriek like stressed steel, wood is caned, metal is filed, and every strike is calibrated for textural impact. His playing often behaves more like an additional string or noise source than a traditional drum role, occupying the space between Nakagawa’s cello and Hino’s stuttering samples. On “XIII”, Nakagawa’s curved bow draws out tones “like wounded bears grunting in the distance”, while Golebiewski answers with bowed cymbal overtones that recall midnight freight trains braking in a depot; Hino’s electronics swarm around them, sometimes imitating brush strokes on skins, sometimes dissolving into granular mist. The effect is one of constant mirroring and mimicry, each musician echoing the others’ timbres until authorship blurs.
Throughout the album, the trio cultivates a balance between spontaneous combustion and microscopic control. The tracks are titled only with Roman numerals, reflecting the fact that the material emerged in the moment rather than from pre-composed charts. Yet the editing and micro-structuring give the impression of music that has been obsessively mapped: motifs recur at different tempos and densities, spectral relationships between cello harmonics and cymbal overtones are teased out, and rhythmic figures are implied more through distribution of events than through obvious meter. Pieces like “IV” thread tainted-flute-like cello tones through intricate electroid patterns, with Golebiewski acting as a cracked mirror - responding with uneasy scrapes and acrobatic flurries that tilt the music toward hallucinatory expressionism rather than straight improv or jazz.
Visually, the project is anchored by Alicja Pakosz’s cover painting, “A Guide To Cutting Edge Time Management”, which depicts a knife edge splitting a jet of water - an image that perfectly encapsulates the album’s core dynamic: flow subjected to incision, continuity cleaved by sharp interventions. Mixed by Hino and mastered/cut by Stefan Betke at Scape Mastering, the record foregrounds the physicality of every gesture - bow hair on string, stick on metal, aliasing in a mangled sample - while leaving enough negative space for the trio’s spontaneous architecture to breathe. Repercussions ultimately feels less like a studio document and more like a captured event: three seasoned experimenters drawing on decades of collective experience in noise, improv, electroacoustics and rhythm research to “form and ignite a credible world out of thin air,” a world where every impact is both sound and aftershock, cause and repercussion.
