Roger Turner

Utterly beguiling recording of two great improvisers at work in the Hara Museum, Tokyo in the winter of 2013. Tthis duo brings together London's Roger Turner on percussion with Japan's own Otomo Yoshihide on guitar and amplifier, an improv meeting of two masters with very different but equally impressive histories. Across four tracks ranging in length from four to sixteen-and-a-half minutes—forty minutes altogether—they give an object lesson in the art of duo improvisation, a format in which both players are constantly exposed with no easy place to hide, although that clearly holds no fear for either Turner or Otomo. Drumset, percussion, guitar, amplifier - a simple set up that produces complex and extremely dynamic results, with immense swells of enveloping feedback, fragile cymbal scrapes that hover at the edge of audibility, ecstatic free-rock clatter and slyly resonant melodies. "Sounds hide within shadows, and what might be a discreet scrape on a cymbal could equally be an inconspicuously stroked guitar string. The musicians feed their material into the space, enough to be picked up by their feedback system, after which they ride their own sounds, penetrating inside the noise to throw its shapes." - Philip Clark, The Guardian