In an age where so many old live recordings of various qualities are so widely available online, it is to NoBusiness's credit that they have chosen Sun's Blessings as the latest feature of their Chap Chap series. The album merits rerelease and physical afterlife. Two percussionists on their first tour captured live at Zippy Hall in Sappolo, Japan in 1999, when apparently the Japanese scene was kicking as hard as that in the US. Toyozumi, it turns out, had been an admirer of Murray's work since early Ayler, and by this time, after years of on and off contact, he and Murray had already become friends, though this tour is their first (and only?) collaboration of real significance.

I cannot speak to the extent of the tour, or whether this performance happened in the early or later days of it, but what immediately struck my ear on first listen was the meticulous excavation and ordering of space. Over the first ten minutes or so of the 45-minute "Mischevous Sage", each drummer chips away at an exclusive corner of a shared cavern, hammering through a unique substance of rock. Each clash and clang takes is step closer to the other musician and a common center, not in a locked groove, but in the sense of shared vocabularies, mood, and aesthetics. The approach is as methodical as its result is clangorous, and the fascination comes in witnessing the two approaching and shaping that center in real time. The joy is in the grit and course of the process rather than some clean-edged and polished product.

The second piece, "Brave Warriors", adopts the opposite approach. Rather than starting apart, and exchanging blasts until they agree on a sound, the two riff on a steady march of seven notes. Over the subsequent 15 minutes, the track unfolds around that theme in billows of clucks and clacks and crashes all revolving around that initial motif, gnarled, frayed, implied, but tenaciously repeated until the end. Through all the insistent irregular beats and rifts, how the motif repeats, each time adding another ripple to the track's underlying current and, in the process, showing how in the right hands even the simplest rhythms can hypnotize.

The sound quality of the recording itself is far from perfect, though one can only expect so much from club tapes three decades old. What is more, the crackles and other imperfections add a layer of crepitating resonance that emphasize Murray's heavy use of cymbals and otherwise brighten the duo's clattery dialogue, emphasizing this recording as an artifact itself as well as a record of an utterly mesmerizing performance.