“The album feels starkly spacious. While it distinctly lacks the shuffling ambience of a live record, it bears an immediacy which makes the listener feel as if they are in the room with Higuchi”
There is a 1998 episode of The Simpsons with a scene in which Lisa is watching an avant garde violinist in a jazz club. The punter next to her scoffs and says, “It sounds like she’s hitting a baby with a cat.” Lisa replies, “You have to listen to the notes she’s not playing,” to which he retorts, “I can do that at home.”
In this gag, the writers identify a thoroughgoing concern of avant garde music – the notion that silence is just as aesthetically significant as sound; that ostensible absence can be fecund or positively charged. The affinity of this concern with the Japanese concept of ma or negative space informs this new record by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Keiko Higuchi, whose A side consists solely of her singing and piano playing while on the B side she is joined by Louis Inage on electric bass.
Originally published by The Wire.