LP ltd to 290, black vinyl, 2 color (blue & red) silkscreened jacket with obi (off white, tan, blue), insert and a postcard. On March 20th, 2025, in a studio in Koenji, Archeus recorded twice. The morning session was the trio alone. The afternoon and evening brought a fourth musician into the room, the first time in the group's history that anyone else has played with them. Spiral Code is the whole of that day, six pieces across two sides.
The Tokyo trio of Keiko Higuchi on voice, drums, percussion and trombone, Shizuo Uchida on four strings and Tomo on hurdy gurdy have been circling a very particular idea of group playing since their self-released debut in 2021. Spiral Code is their second album for An'archives, following Kusōzu: Nine Death Stages in 2023, and their seventh release overall. All three come out of the deeper end of the Japanese underground and carry long histories elsewhere: Higuchi with Sachiko in Albedo Fantastica and, with Uchida, in Albedo Gravitas; Uchida in MAI MAO, Kito-Mizukumi Rouber and TERROR SHIT; TOMO in Tetragrammaton, and on stage with Keiji Haino and Mitsuru Tabata, among others. None of that lexicon gets carried into archeus intact. The trio start from scratch each time.
The range on this record is wider than anything they've committed to tape before. There are passages of dense, humid noise that close in on the listener, and there are stretches where the three of them thin the music down to a few tones moving slowly across empty ground. Higuchi's voice works as an instrument among instruments, sometimes wordless, sometimes pushed toward something closer to speech. Uchida's strings hold the low end without settling into a bass role. Tomo's hurdy gurdy is the unstable element, one moment grinding out a drone, the next spilling notes at speed.
Kiyotaka Moriuchi, an improviser who has worked with Shoko Numao and Ensemble Shippolly, joins on percussion and darbuka for two pieces, Awakening, Beyond Recurrence and Where Points And Lines Intersect. He slots in without disturbing anything. TOMO describes what the trio are after as an interesting chemistry or, as he puts it, an alchemical reaction among the three of them, and the point about years of playing together is that the shifts in direction arrive without visible negotiation. Moriuchi finds the same current and rides it.
The title came from all three members at once, each of them reaching independently for spiral imagery: the coiled serpent of Kundalini, the Caduceus, and the double helix of DNA, which TOMO reads as the code that carries life forward. It fits the music, which is entwined in exactly that sense - three lines wound around each other, holding a shape.
Issued in an edition of 290 copies on black vinyl, in a two-colour silkscreened jacket printed by Alan Sherry, with obi, insert and postcard.
