Relativity/Only
*2023 stock* In conjunction with long-standing Australian outsider music label and mail order Shame File, Nice Music presents a new full length recording from Clinton Green. 'Relativity/Only' is Green's clearest refinement of the dutiful and curious work he has cultivated over several years in recording his gently automated percussion experiments. Green conjures a celestial zoom view of a very private cosmos, using turntables as a source of movement and various static or suspended instruments an…
But Everything Now Left Before It Arrived
*2023 stock. 300 copies limited edition* Guitarist John Russell, a leading figure on Britain's improvised music scene, passed away on January 19, 2021. Born in December 1954, Russell started performing improvised music in London in his late teens, and for many years he toured and gave concerts not only in the UK and Europe but throughout the world. Known as a Japanophile, Russell traveled to Japan for the first time in 2001, and subsequently visited the country many times, including as recently …
September 23, 2021
*2023 stock* Wakana Ikeda is a flute player whose activities range widely, from performances of composed works to improvised and popular music. She also leads the experimental music group Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble. In 2021, Ikeda and Swiss cellist Stefan Thut released the duo album "afar" on the Ftarri label. Guitarist Takashi Masubuchi started playing improvised music in the latter half of the 2000s, and since 2018 has focused on acoustic guitar performance. While Ikeda and Masubuchi are musi…
To Listen To As Far As Possible
*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* Seijiro Murayama is a drummer/percussionist and improviser/composer who lives in Paris. His first CDs on Ftarri's three labels (Hitorri, Ftarri and Meenna) came out in 2009, and he has since released a total of 12 solo, duo, trio and quartet albums on Ftarri labels. Of the solo albums, the first was "Downdate" (2017), followed by "The Empire of Slip of the Tongue" (2018) and "mi-tai" (2020). While "Downdate" and "The Empire of Slip of the Tongue" are elec…
CTX1
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Masahiko Okura is a Tokyo-based reed player (clarinet, alto sax, etc.), improviser and composer. Apart from his performances on reed instruments, he is energetically engaged in performance activities with his solo project Active Recovering Music. Okura is also a member of the experimental music group Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble.
In 2004, Okura released the solo album "Time Service" on the Improvised Music from Japan label. The highly original performance …
Masahide Tokunaga
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Masahide Tokunaga is a Tokyo-based alto sax player/improviser who carries out extremely distinctive performances comprised mainly of long tones. On the Hitorri label he has released the improvised performance CDs "Alto Saxophone 2" (2015) and "Bwoouunn: Fleeting Excitement" (2017), as well as "while your master is sleeping" (2020), on which he performs a composition by Taku Sugimoto. With the exception of that composition recording, "Masahide Tokunaga" is…
Cold Light In Warm Blue
*200 copies limited edition* Tokyo-based pianist Fumi Endo has been performing since 2017, playing mainly jazz and improvised music. Her distinctive, minimalistic performances have garnered a great deal of attention. Endo has performed frequently at Ftarri since September 2020.
While she participated in two 2022 Ftarri CD releases—Takumi Ikeda’s "Musical Procedure" (Ftarri Classical, ftarricl-663), and the eponymous "Masahide Tokunaga" (Hitorri, hitorri-970)—Endo had no previous releases on Ftar…
Several
*200 copies limited release* "Needless to say, anything new from saxophonist / composer Anna Webber raises an eyebrow or two. Her works for large and small ensembles exhibit a knotty sophistication that can be compared to that of Anthony Braxton. Here, she teams with experimental multi-instrumentalist Weston Olencki for just over 32 minutes of sax / trombone outside improv.
Several comes across more in the established style of Olencki than that of Webber. While there are a number of contrapuntal…
Tayutauta
Tip! *200 copies limited edition* While continuously engaged in the field of traditional Japanese music, female-school gidayu shamisen player Yumiko Tanaka has since the 1990s been carrying out multifaceted musical activities including contemporary classical music, improvisation (in 1996-97 she was a member of Otomo Yoshihide’s band Ground-Zero), experimental music, and theater performance/composition, performing and exchanging ideas with many musicians from Japan and other countries. While Tana…
Phase to Phase
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Katie and Lucio met over the internet almost every Tuesday for one year, composing two pieces, rehearsing, talking about their lives, and recording. The desire to play together began after exchanging work and perceiving a deeply common approach to bass clarinet playing, to sound, and to music. The two pieces offered here are based in a very distinctive but still strictly coherent approach in relation to the work they intend to do.
Phase to Phase 1 is a ce…
Dig Up Roots
*100 copies limited edition* "Dig Up Roots" is a document of a live performance at Tokyo Arts and Space on July 1, 2022. Ryosuke Kiyasu plays snare drum and table, presenting an extreme and cathartic relationship with physical surfaces and their characteristic tolerances, as exploited with wood, hands, and body. Notably the distinctive acoustics of the space can be felt deeply throughout the performance, not to mention the overblown recording. The space’s container is audible, fluctuating, and s…
Sept duos pour guitare acoustique & piano préparé
Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments…
Archaisms I
Sorey and Rudolph began performing as a percussion duet in 2018. Sorey states “we seemed so in sync with each other, in part, perhaps, because we are both composers as well as percussionists.” Archaisms 1 is the recorded document of that concert. Sorey & Rudolph brought their unique and evolved rhythm and sonic languages to the fore, through inspired and spirited dialogue. The music flows as one complete piece with several movements or sections. This music exists on its own terms reflecting the …
The Devil, Probably
*300 copies limited edition* The Devil, Probably is Patrick Shiroishi (saxophones), from Los Angeles, Àlex Reviriego (double bass) and Vasco Trilla (percussion), both from Barcelona, altogether in a long-distance correspondence. The three of them are key figures of the youngest generation of their respective free improvisation and avant-garde scenes, where they develop an unstoppable and vibrant activity, deeply involved in reconfiguring its boundaries with unforeseen references and sounds. An e…
FFlair III
"Basically, we witness an intimate dialogue between two improvisers. If there had not been a special circumstance leading to this result. Christine Abdelnour and Hans Koch could not hear each other. In fact, "FFlair" is based on two separately recorded solo improvisations, which were superimposed at the end. Mind you, without any subsequent editing." - Rudolf Amstutz
Iterations
*2023 stock* Iterations is the (mostly) unedited documentation of a single session of duets of Carlos Santistevan (upright bass) and Tara Khozein (voice) recorded on Friday June 25th, 2021, in Santa Fe, NM. We made these sounds, thinking very often of our common friend and mentor, J.A. "Dino" Deane, who took his final exit shortly after we made this recording. 2 humans, 2 microphones, 1 instrument, 1 voice. 16 Iterations.
dissolution of the other
Tip! Banjo and woodblocks are the scarce ingredients of Poor Isa's second album, ‘dissolution of the other’. The instruments can be used not only in their usual form, but in alternative tunings, with preparations and additional attributes. This creates an otherworldly vacuum, rich in silence and shadow, with sounds that seem equally familiar as mystical. The music is broken up from its classical form and sounds like an instrumental eld recording or a musical ceremony. In contrast to the rst al…
Pre-Existence
*2023 stock* Limted 2022 restock, last copies. Originally released in 2006. Tetuzi Akiyama has been a major player on the free music/improv scene in Tokyo for over 20 years. Pre-Existence first came out on CD as a part of the great Wooden Guitar series from Locust. Akiyama's playing here is one of a minimalist approach, discovering and investigating the empty spaces between each note. He does not follow the Takoma guitar school style of finger-picking, but instead invokes a far more warped primi…
Roads
Ted Byrnes is a drummer/percussionist living in Los Angeles. An alumnus of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, he comes from a jazz background and has since made his home in the worlds of free improvisation, new music, electro-acoustic music, and noise. Ted primarily works in ad hoc improvisational settings, but has long standing improvisational groups including duos with Jeff Parker, Chris Cooper, Charlie Mumma, Sam McKinlay, William Hutson, and a trio with Jacob Wick and Michael Foster…
Soma
*2023 stock* The duο’s work focuses on the creative fusion of composition and improvisation, where links between experienced and ideal sound are constantly being formed and deformed. This double CD reflects the two dimensions of Soma. The first CD presents the close musical liaison between Anisengos and Atzakas, along with three additional trios with Michalis Siganidis. The second CD features guest musicians, Savvina Yannatou, Maria Thoidou and Michalis Siganidis, who form trios, quartets and qu…