At its best, improvised music plunges all parties into the unknown. This 1993 recording, which comes from a concert at Café Amores in Hofu City, Yamashita Prefecture, Japan, achieves that objective on several counts. For a start, if you’re not already ultra-tuned in to the Japanese and Korean improvised music scenes, you may not know a lot about either player. While bassist Yoshizawa made key recordings with Kaoru Abe, Masayuki Takayanagi and Derek Bailey, the only English-language writing to address his work at any length was a memorial piece published in Halana 4 upon his death five years after this recording. Kim was a drummer with experience playing both rock and free music, and if there’s anything written on him in English, it has evaded this writer’s internet searches. Both musicians have benefitted posthumously from the Lithuanian No Business label’s release of a series of previously unissued live albums, including this one.

While both players were important early figures in their respective nations’ free music scenes, neither sounds particularly beholden to any method save his own. And each was very particular about gear. While Yoshizawa had played a conventional double bass, in the last years of his life he favored an electrified five-string upright bass, which he ran through an electronic signal chain that amplified the bulk and abrasiveness of his playing without obscuring his unerring nimbleness. Reportedly Kim’s set-up around this time included two cymbals and two drums, one a larger, Korean instrument, which he played using up to three sticks per hand.

While each of the three tracks on Way Of The Breeze runs just less or a little more than 20 minutes, there’s no sense of wasted time. These musicians create form in the moment of action; each questing, bowed phrase and rhythmic progression traces a shape that feels necessary and indisputable. Yoshizawa’s playing has a sense of line that easily bridges the spaces imposed by bowing and plucking, building a sense of tension that Kim intensifies with variations of velocity and volume. The bassist’s electronic set-up lacks the familiar distortion and looping that are de rigeur these days, but brings a novel plasticity that renders certain of his tones squeezable and slippery, and others subtly echoing. And Kim’s playing uses a combination of woody tonality and spare, irregular propulsion that owes little to either jazz or free improv rhythmic concepts. The listener might not know where this is going, but neither player betrays a speck of doubt.