Blended, bleated, and burnished, it's not always clear who's playing what across this fifty-minute sonic sphere of eventides and ill-mannered, nocturnal dissonance. What matters is that Mssrs. Uchihashi and Scott are confident enough in their blossoming soundscapes to let their freak flags fly. This ain't your mother's old-time improv, not by the odd stretch. In these randy soundworlds, angels dance on pin-heads so sharp their toes bleed from the friction. Noises erupt, cackle, airburst, disintegrate and reassemble as gleeful sprites eager to mutate across a whole spectrum of hues and textures. Even after multiple spins, the breadth of new vocabularies taking shape before your ears is dizzying to say the least.
String-sympathizer Uchihasi adroitly massages Hans Reichel's hoary daxophone in the same elastic manner with which he approaches guitar; he lets the instrument speak in wooden tongues with a well-understood grasp of its own linguistic veracity. What often results from Uchihasi's fingerpicking is a raging turmoil of toxic squeaks, thorny ascensions, and fibrous tinctures that counterpoint Scott's awesome electronic arsenal, a preening mass of tawdry synthesizer effects and irruptive Buchla thunder. Spastic new ecosystems arise as each musician bends their notes to ideas informed by their own absurd pretzel logic. "The Many Trials of Kenpachiro Satsuma" essentially makes flesh some alternate universe Pynchon novel, its fizzy integers revealing an infinite stream of consciousness crying out from lots forty-nine and beyond.
Richard Scott's pedigree is well-stated, as one of the electroacoustic malcontents comprising Grutronic, in addition to finding ideal foils in fellow aberrant synthesist Thomas Lehn and peripatetic trumpeter Axel Dorner. Uchihasi's instruments of choice replicate Scott's patchcord epiphanies to a "T"; that the sounds don't feel so much plucked as generated distill the raw essence of the words 'electro' and 'acoustic'. Origins mean little here — context trumps all. These are improvisers whose exceedingly visceral constructs go viral, an andromeda strain of constantly evolving paradox and pluck, experimentalism pushing at established norms and soft boundaries. New music, broken free of its Cage, attacking and decaying in equal measure.
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