Agencement

condition (record/cover): NM / NM 

Edition of 300 copies in tip-on sleeve.

Two identically titled LPs, issued three years apart on the Japanese private imprint Pico, in editions of 300 copies each. Both are the work of Hideaki Shimada (born Kanazawa, 1962), the painter, violinist, and electroacoustic autodidact who launched his Agencement project around 1985 after some years of solo tape experiments in the shadow of the Japanese improvised-music underground.

The method across both records is recognisable: violin as primary source, processed through ring modulator, analogue rerecording, stacked multi-track overdubs, and the patient cellular logic Shimada had absorbed from aleatoric and Systems Music without ever sounding academic. On Pico-01 (1986), the palette is still raw, closer to a private improvisation diary than to the more composed later works. Pico-02 (1989) steps into a denser, more stochastic mode, the violin now functioning more as a field generator than a solo instrument, skittering against its own processed echoes in clouds of pizzicati.

The word agencement is French for "arrangement" or "set-up." Shimada uses it in something closer to the Deleuze and Guattari sense: an assembly, a configuration of elements that produces something none of them carried on their own. For anyone tracking the Japanese experimental violin lineage that runs from Takehisa Kosugi's Catch Wave through Keiji Haino to Kazuhisa Uchihashi, these two self-released LPs are foundational artifacts of an unusually patient voice.