*250 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based guitarist/composer Taku Sugimoto and cellist/composer Stefan Thut, who lives in Solothurn, Switzerland, have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Japan. Their duo CD "Taku Sugimoto / Stefan Thut," which was released on the Ftarri label in 2018, was highly praised.

The new duo CD by Sugimoto and Thut, "atwain," documents their performance of a single 39-minute work on the riverside in Solothurn in March 2024. Sugimoto played guitar, tingsha (small Tibetan cymbals) and the percussion instrument claves, while Thut played psaltery, tingsha and claves. Throughout the performance, their instrumental sounds were produced in a gentle and spacious way, with many intervals, amid the clearly audible sounds of the flowing river, singing birds, footsteps, etc. The CD includes liner notes by Stefan Thut (in English).

"One word—"atwain"—as a compositional seed to produce various forms of activities and appearances: "Atwain" is an archaic expression meaning in two parts and goes back to middle English "atweyne." In my work an earlier implementation of "atwain" was about finding distinct house numbers in a street. Two people would follow the series of twin prime numbers and stay in front of the respective buildings for a time. What is being developed more in the present version of "atwain" is the aspect of twoness and how this is transformed to an activity about having and making sound available. By sitting on two nearby benches each other's doings were barely noticeable yielding a counterpoint of the unknown. Then the instrument tingsha was being taken in its two parts and distributed to the two performers to reassemble it by a common hit. The emerging asynchronicity showed us the impossibility of togetherness in this musical act, classically speaking. The separation of the two performers was enlarged further by measuring outside architecture and accentuating certain spots by hitting claves. Sugimoto and Thut have been working together again and again in a variety of indoor and outdoor settings since 2008. A large distance between two performers is a feature in a previous project, "atama," from 2019, released by Zoomin' Night. The
present work was performed and recorded in the outskirts of Solothurn in early spring 2024 using and mixing instruments and movements within urban and seasonal conditions." - Stefan Thut