★Ftarri
Music Performance 'KIYOH'
Yumiko Tanaka is a gidayu shamisen player active in the fields of contemporary classical and improvised music as well as traditional Japanese music. Tanaka performed as a musician and actress in Hashirigaki (premiered in 2000), a music theater production by German composer/director Heiner Goebbels; and created the music for and performed in Dogugaeshi (premiered in 2004), an object theater work by American puppeteer Basil Twist. Based on these experiences, in December 2010 she created, pr…
Immediate Landscapes
Sound artist Akio Suzuki crisscrosses the world with his self-made instruments. British tenor/soprano sax player John Butcher is a leading figure in improvised music. These two musicians have been carrying out duo performances since 2002. The six tracks on this CD are recordings of their duos in Scotland in 2006 and Tokyo in 2015. In June 2006, an event was held in which Suzuki and Butcher visited and performed in places around Scotland that have highly distinctive acoustic characteristics. Butc…
Listening to the Footsteps of Living Ones Who Are Still on the G
This is a duo album by Toshimaru Nakamura, a mixer player based in Tokyo, and Martin Taxt, a tuba player living in Oslo. Instead of a conventional tuba, Taxt plays a custom-made “microtonal tuba” capable of producing microtones. In this album, Nakamura incorporates Taxt’s tuba sounds in his mixer through a microphone instead of playing his usual instrument, the no-input mixing board, which does not take in external sounds. The project started with the concept of Nakamura processing the tub…
Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble
Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble (SCE), formed in spring 2016 on the initiative of flute player Wakana Ikeda, is a chamber group which periodically performs contemporary/experimental music concerts. The five members are Wakana Ikeda, Yoko Ikeda (viola), Aya Naito (bassoon), Masahiko Okura (clarinet, bass clarinet), and Taku Sugimoto (guitar). In concerts held at Ftarri, Tokyo, in May and July 2016, SCE performed works by the composers of the Wandelweiser group. The five tracks on this album include p…
A Crescent and Moonflowers
The musicians who appeared in the concert at Ftarri, Tokyo, on June 5, 2016, were young improvisers active in the Tokyo area: Straytone (modular synthesizer), Yui Nakamura (voice), Takashi Masubuchi (guitar), and Masahide Tokunaga (alto sax). Three of the musicians (without Nakamura) performed the first set, followed by all four. Each set was a little less than 30 minutes long. This CD consists of those two sets. In both of these superb performances, an indescribable feeling of unity was produce…
Septet
Guitarist Taku Sugimoto continues his long-term musical activities, with a focus on composing, and also collaborates closely with some of the composers in the Wandelweiser Group. This release is one of the summits of his recent work. Septet is a work of just under 40 minutes, performed by seven musicians on clarinet, flute, viola, contrabass, cello, electric guitar and sine-tones. Throughout, numerous diffuse sound reverberations emerge and overlap, then fade away. The sound progression is simpl…
Ftarri 3rd Anniversary Vol.1
With Yoko Ikeda (viola), Léo Dupleix (electronics), Hikaru Yamada (alto saxophone, microphone) & Hayato Kurosawa (guitar), ffrond (Yoshinori Shiraishi, drums, percussion, Shiro Ochiai, electric piano, Tyler Eaton, double bass). The label made 80 copies each volume and gave some copies to audience members. These are the last copies. The Ftarri store/live performance space in Suidobashi, Tokyo, celebrated its 3rd anniversary in August 2015. To mark this occasion, we held six 3rd anniversary …
Ftarri 3rd Anniversary Vol.2
With Daysuke Takaoka, tuba, Takuro Okada, synthesizer, Hiroyuki Ura, drums, Shinjiro Yamaguchi, guitar, electric metronome, sine wave. The label made 80 copies each volume and gave some copies to audience members. These are the last copies. The Ftarri store/live performance space in Suidobashi, Tokyo, celebrated its 3rd anniversary in August 2015. To mark this occasion, we held six 3rd anniversary concerts in July and August. For each concert we produced a CD-R (each with different music)…
Ftarri 3rd Anniversary Vol.3
With Masashi Takashima, piano, drums, G.I.T.M. Yumiko Yoshimoto, electric guitar. Tomoko Kageyama, marimba, vibraphone, bowl, bells, vocal, voice, field recordings, lyrics & Kei Tainaka, guitar, effects. Takashi Masubuchi, full hollow-body guitar. The label made 80 copies each volume and gave some copies to audience members. These are the last copies. The Ftarri store/live performance space in Suidobashi, Tokyo, celebrated its 3rd anniversary in August 2015. To mark this occasion, we held s…
Ftarri 3rd Anniversary Vol.4
With Yuji Ishihara, drums, percussion. Kayu Nakada, bug synthesizer. Tetsuro Fujimaki, drums, percussion. Riuichi Daijo, acoustic guitar. The label made 80 copies each volume and gave some copies to audience members. These are the last copies. The Ftarri store/live performance space in Suidobashi, Tokyo, celebrated its 3rd anniversary in August 2015. To mark this occasion, we held six 3rd anniversary concerts in July and August. For each concert we produced a CD-R (each with different music…
Ftarri 3rd Anniversary Vol.6
With Yuhei Saito, tape recorders. Tomoe Takizawa, guitar. Yui Nakamura, throat, room. Keitetsu Murai, 4 parallel-connected oscillators with photosensors, stabilized DC power supply, Japanese candle cut in length to burn in about 15 minutes. The label made 80 copies each volume and gave some copies to audience members. These are the last copies. The Ftarri store/live performance space in Suidobashi, Tokyo, celebrated its 3rd anniversary in August 2015. To mark this occasion, we held six 3r…
Ftarri 3rd Anniversary Vol.5
With sawako, laptop. Yuma Takeshita, electro-bass. Tomoyoshi Date, piano. Straytone, modular synthesizer. The label made 80 copies each volume and gave some copies to audience members. These are the last copies. The Ftarri store/live performance space in Suidobashi, Tokyo, celebrated its 3rd anniversary in August 2015. To mark this occasion, we held six 3rd anniversary concerts in July and August. For each concert we produced a CD-R (each with different music) which was presented as a gift …
Routing Lynn
This is the first duo album since 2010 by leading British improvisers Rhodri Davies (harp) and John Butcher (saxophone). In January 2014, together with respected musician and sound recordist Chris Watson, they visited Routing Lynn, an area of ancient rock carvings in Northumberland, northern England. In this natural setting, Davies and Butcher played music and Watson recorded. Two months later, at a festival in Gateshead, England, Davies and Butcher performed along with the 4-channel play…
Mishima, Day & Night
Seijiro Murayama (percussion), who is currently based in Japan, lived in France for a number of years and since that time has performed frequently with the French alto sax player Jean-Luc Guionnet. Mishima, Day & Night is their third duo album after Le Bruit du Toit (Xing-Wu Records, 2007) and Window Dressing (Potlatch, 2011). These four tracks document their improvised music performances in Mishima City at Hongaku Temple (day) and Teke Bar (night) on the same day in July 2013. Murayama uses…
3 amps
Katsuyoshi Kou is an improviser who performs frequently, mainly in venues around Tokyo. Currently he's also gaining a great deal of notice as the director of MultipleTap, a project (launched in 2014) that takes large groups of Japanese improvisational/experimental musicians overseas to hold live events. Toshimaru Nakamura is an improviser who performs throughout the world using his no-input mixing board. This CD is comprised of three pieces performed in concerts by Kou and Nakamura at Ftarri, To…
Between Two
Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar) and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board) of Japan and Switzerland-based American drummer Jason Kahn are all leading musicians on the contemporary improvised music scene who perform internationally and have many album releases. The 4 pieces on this CD were performed live by Akiyama, Nakamura and Kahn at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo, during Kahn's stay in Japan in May 2014. Akiyama's softly resonating guitar makes subtle inroads into the pulsating electronic sounds cre…
Compilation
This 7-CD set contains 19 selected performances from the Ftarri Festival, held in April 2008 (Kyoto / Tokyo), and the Ftarri doubtmusic Festival, held in September 2010. The 7 CDs, together with a sequentially numbered Ftarri Collection card, come in a special handmade felt bag about 18 cm high and 17 cm wide. Each bag has a different design. Ftarri Collection 1 with Opera Southern Cross (Taku Sugimoto: composition, images. Katsuaki Iida: words, reading. Toshimaru Nakamura: no-input mixing board…
Active recovering music
Active Recovering Music (ARM) is a slide whistle ensemble led by sax player Masahiko Okura. All of the members play the slide whistle. Okura debuted ARM in concert with a five-member formation in 2008. He's since continued the group's activity (though their live performances are infrequent) with changing numbers of players. This is the recording of a performance by ARM--this time with eight members--which took place at Ftarri, Tokyo, in February 2013. Each of the three pieces was composed by Oku…
Hello
Takahiro Kawaguchi began making field recordings and performing improvised music in 2000, and in recent years has attracted a great deal of attention as a sound artist. In January 2009 he released, on Taku Unami's label Hibari Music, the solo album n, on which he uses several remodeled counters. Shinjiro Yamaguchi, born in 1983, is an electronic music player. in October 2008 he released the minimal ambient solo album Kogai on the Japanese label Cherry Music.This is the debut album of Kawaguchi a…
Carliol
'John Butcher: tenor or soprano saxophones - plus feedback, motors, embedded harp speaker. Rhodri Davies: pedal harp, lever harp with embedded speaker and electric harp, aeolian electric harp. John Butcher is one of the leading sax players on the free improvisation scene. Rhodri Davies transcends conventional ideas about the harp--an instrument rarely associated with improvised music--in his wide-ranging projects. The two British musicians have worked together in a variety of contexts sin…