The second album from the duo of Midori Takada and Jakob Bro, arriving on the Copenhagen based imprint Loveland Records just under a year after their first. Recorded at AVACO in Tokyo, From Such A Blue Sky finds Takada in an expanded palette of percussion, piano, and marimba, playing the perfect foil for Bro's guitar.

Born in 1951, Takada belongs to a radical generation of Japanese artists who came of age during the post-war period. Classically trained at the Tokyo University of the Arts, she worked as a percussionist in Berlin during the mid-1970s before returning to Japan, dissatisfied with the European classical tradition, and entering a period of expanded study of African drumming and Indonesian gamelan while becoming immersed in the Minimalism then emerging from the United States. Those points of reference converged in Mkwaju Ensemble and in her 1983 solo debut, Through The Looking Glass, recorded across three days with Takada playing every part. The album's 2017 reissue turned decades of neglect into wide celebration and set off a prolific late period marked by duo work with younger artists: Kang Tae Hwan, Shomyo of Koya-san, Shhe, and Bro, with whom she cut last year's Until I Met You.

Born in 1978, Bro has spent 25 years as a bandleader in Copenhagen while working in the ensembles of Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Paul Motian, and Charles Lloyd. The pair first crossed paths in Berlin in 2022, on a commission from Pierre Boulez Saal with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, where Takada had been in residence as an orchestra percussionist nearly 45 years before. Two improvised concerts followed, in Berlin and Copenhagen, and the collaboration has carried forward ever since.

Across six tracks the pair unfurl their conversations at a glacial pace, placing each note and rhythmical element with exactitude while remaining loose and spontaneously responsive. At moments the music borders on the baroque, profoundly harmonically seductive, before surprising tonal combinations push it toward more experimental realms, particularly in the second track's extended passages on gongs. Sprawling ambiences, "Fourth-World" sensibilities, and hypnotically pulsing minimalism define the broader whole, with clear through lines back to Through The Looking Glass.

Issued by Loveland on CD, with cover design by the Danish painter Tal R.