The image presented by this album is somewhat simplistic: turntables and computers, the formers operated by Otomo Yoshihide, the latters triggered by Nobukazu Takemura. But please, don't forget that Yoshihide can make a turntable sound like the maddest of computer algorithms and that Takemura seems to reinvent the computer -- and his music -- every time he touches it. This meeting happened on March 29, 2003, at the Super Deluxe club. The CD presents the unedited first-ever performance by this duo, a single 46-minute ...
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The image presented by this album is somewhat simplistic: turntables and computers, the formers operated by Otomo Yoshihide, the latters triggered by Nobukazu Takemura. But please, don't forget that Yoshihide can make a turntable sound like the maddest of computer algorithms and that Takemura seems to reinvent the computer -- and his music -- every time he touches it. This meeting happened on March 29, 2003, at the Super Deluxe club. The CD presents the unedited first-ever performance by this duo, a single 46-minute improvisation. It features Takemura moving ever deeper into abstract sound art and Yoshihide finding a balance between his guerilla noise assaults of the early '90s with Ground Zero and his later painstakingly conceptual projects. The performance consists of electrical hums, sine waves, gushes of noise, vinyl pops, shards of voices (speaking, singing), and instruments, all choreographed into a rather predictable and yet very powerful dance. The piece begins in chaos -- not that the improvisers cannot find each other, they simply decided, it seems, to adopt a chaotic behavior in order to keep the puzzle scrambled and their individual voices distinct. Episodes of dadaist humor intermingle with moments of paradoxical beauty. Then, halfway through the performance, the flow of sounds quiets down; identifiable samples (music, voices) are pushed aside and electricity becomes the focus of the piece. The two artists unite forces to conjure up a storm from the quiet hums remaining, a storm that produces a thunderous climax followed by a short catharsis to let you reconnect with the real world and start breathing again. This set is a noise-based free improv class act (including the level of predictability this choice of words imply). ~ François Couture, Rovi
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