Long-overdue vinyl reissue of one of the most consequential records ever to emerge from the Japanese avant-garde: We Now Create (Music for Strings, Winds and Percussion) by the Togashi Masahiko Quartet, recorded at Tokyo Studio Center on May 23rd, 1969 and originally issued that September on Victor. Faithfully reissued on heavyweight gatefold LP, complete with Japanese obi-strip and restored artwork, this is the definitive vinyl edition of a record that, more than any other single document, marks the arrival of Japanese free jazz on the world stage.

By the late 1960s, the seismic shifts emanating from the New York lofts and the European free improvisation scene had begun to find their own resonance in Tokyo, where a small group of musicians was developing a vocabulary at once indebted to and entirely distinct from its Western precedents. Drummer and composer Masahiko Togashi stood at the centre of that emergence. A prodigy who had played professionally since his teens, by 1969 he had absorbed everything from hard bop to Coltrane to Cage and was poised to articulate a music wholly his own. For this session he convened what is, in retrospect, an almost impossibly stacked lineup: guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, whose use of amplified feedback and prepared electric guitar would prove foundational to noise and improvised music in Japan and beyond; tenor saxophonist and reedsman Mototeru Takagi, here also playing his self-devised "corn-pipe"; and the protean Motoharu Yoshizawa on bass and cello, whose extended-technique vocabulary remains a touchstone for low-end improvisers worldwide. It is no exaggeration to say that the four musicians on this record are the founding fathers of Japanese free jazz - and that We Now Create is the moment they stepped into history.

Across four extended compositions - Variations On A Theme Of "Feed-Back", Invitation To "Corn-Pipe" Dance, Artistry In Percussion and Fantasy For Strings - the quartet maps a deeply considered architecture of sound that refuses the easy thrills of energy music in favour of something far stranger and more searching. Takayanagi's feedback shimmers and erupts; Takagi's reeds move from breath-tones to keening cries; Yoshizawa's bowed bass and cello carve open fissures of dark resonance; and through it all Togashi orchestrates, his percussion at once propulsive and chamber-like, treating the kit as an ensemble of distinct voices rather than a rhythmic engine. The record's subtitle - Music for Strings, Winds and Percussion - is no afterthought: this is composed improvisation in the deepest sense, a music that listens to itself with extraordinary patience even at its most volatile.

On its release, We Now Create shared the Japan Jazz Prize with the Sato Masahiko Trio's Palladium, and has since become a holy grail for collectors of Japanese underground music, original Victor copies regularly trading for staggering sums. For anyone interested in the deep history of free improvisation - or simply in one of the most beautiful, mysterious and forward-looking records ever made anywhere - it is essential.

Personnel: Masahiko Togashi (drums, percussion, composer); Masayuki Takayanagi (guitar); Mototeru Takagi (tenor saxophone, reeds, corn-pipe); Motoharu Yoshizawa (bass, cello). Recorded May 23rd, 1969 at Tokyo Studio Center.