2 × 180g vinyl LP, Flating jacket, Obi. Deluxe edition. Informel emerged from the rupture of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and stands as the point of origin for the present-day Sinsuke Fujieda Group. With regular performance activity brought to a halt, Sinsuke Fujieda was given time to reconsider his own music at its deepest level, and to ask himself what the music was that he truly wanted to express now. His answer was to return to jazz as his foundation, and to pursue, through both composition and performance, the most intense music he could imagine within a single ensemble. The album is reconstructed from a live recording made on 22 October 2020 at Live Music Jirokichi in Koenji, Tokyo, a formative performance out of which the present-day Sinsuke Fujieda Group emerged, newly edited and reassembled from Fujieda's perspective in 2026.
Rooted in spiritual jazz, modal jazz, improvisation and chamber-like ensemble work, the record captures the moment when the group's distinctive musical language first became tangible in sound. The intensity of the interplay had already reached what could be regarded as a complete form, producing a sonic image that could only have existed on that particular day, in that particular place. Across six compositions written and arranged by Fujieda - Fukushima, Gentle Erosion, Informel, Bamboo, Nobody Knows and Parade - the music moves from quiet concentration toward elevation and flashes of energy generated through improvisation.
The performance was conceived by Fujieda to include live painting by Taiki Kusakabe, created simultaneously with the music. Responding to sound, time, space and physical movement, lines and colours accumulated across the canvas until a single painting was completed at the very moment the final piece came to an end. Music and painting came into being together, turning the performance into a work in which time, tension and intersecting energies were translated into both sound and visual form. The title derives from Art Informel, the movement that developed primarily in postwar France. Its embrace of material, physical gesture, spontaneity, the unconscious, and forms that emerge beyond predetermined structures strongly reflects what Fujieda seeks in improvisation and ensemble performance.
Rather than presenting these recordings simply as a document of the past, Fujieda revisited, re-edited, remixed and remastered them from his perspective in 2026. This is not a straightforward reissue of the 2021 edition, but a newly reconstructed work of approximately 73 minutes, shaped as a double LP through the perspective gained after Fukushima. It rereads the group's source, prototype and premonition, reconnecting past, present and future.
Within Informel are already present the seeds of the musical language that would emerge more clearly on Fukushima. It contains, in a sense, the premonition of a future that had already existed in the past. Released as a limited-edition 2LP on 180g vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve.
