Third Night Sparks documents a particular kind of Tokyo night: small room, low ceiling, close ears, three musicians leaning so far into the moment that a one‑off gig quietly becomes a band. In July 2025, Akio Jeimus took up a short residency at Bar Isshee, the intimate venue run by Shunichi “Isshee” Ishida, staging four different trio configurations with Tokyo‑based players – some long‑time allies, some entirely new pairings. The Saturday set felt different from the moment it began. Joining Jeimus were T. Mikawa, legendary force behind Incapacitants and one of the defining figures of Japanese noise, on electronics, and Risa Takeda on synthesizers, a frequent Jeimus collaborator whose approach to voltage tends toward the sculptural and the melodic. The combination sparked immediately: two sets of free‑ranging sound that moved with a rare, mindful pace, balancing ferocity and restraint.
The trio’s chemistry hinges on contrast. Mikawa brings decades of experience pushing circuits to meltdown, but here his electronics thread between full‑bore eruptions and finely grained interference, flashes of classic noise energy tempered by an awareness of space. Takeda’s synth work wraps around and through that, generating tides of tone, pulses, and stray melodies that can either cushion the harsher edges or amplify them into something more dazzling. Jeimus acts as the hinge between these vectors, listening sharply, feeding in texture, rhythm, or counter‑noise as needed, shaping the overall trajectory without ever imposing a rigid frame. Across both sets, you can feel the group settling into an “in‑the‑moment” flow where nobody forces a climax and nobody hides: sections swell, thin out, and twist direction not because of any plan, but because that’s where the trio’s collective intuition points.
Part of the charm of Third Night Sparks lies in its setting. Bar Isshee is a room where performer and audience share almost the same air, and the recording catches that closeness: the sense that sounds are bouncing off wood and bodies, not disappearing into a void. Between sets, the atmosphere was as important as the music. After the second performance, the three musicians and Isshee stayed on, drinking and sharing Mikawa’s home‑made otsumami – small plates, small talk, a gentle decompression after the intensity. It’s the kind of detail that usually evaporates once the amps are switched off, but here it lingers as part of the record’s aura: you’re not just hearing a document of harsh sonics and abstract electronics, but the residue of a night that felt complete on its own terms.
Initially, there were no plans to release the show. Each member had made their own recording of the performance – habit, archive, personal notes. In the weeks that followed, files began to circulate between them, snippets replayed and reconsidered. What might have remained a private memory started to sound, in their shared listening, like something that deserved a broader life. Without pressure or overthinking, the three reached the same conclusion: these sets held together as a work, not just a memento. Third Night Sparks is the result of that slow, unanimous decision – a live album born from after‑the‑fact recognition that a particular evening at Bar Isshee had quietly crossed a threshold, becoming not just another night in a residency, but a singular event worth returning to, again and again.
