Ikizukuri is the trio of Portuguese bass player Gonçalo Almeida and drummer Gustavo Costa plus German, Portugal-based sax player Julius Gabriel, titled after the controversial Japanese method (生き作り) of preparing raw fish – sashimi – from live seafood, served when the seafood is still alive. The trio defines itself as decomposing free jazz, re-electrifying and revivifying it, and like the Japanese seafood, serving it alive and breathing.

«Suicide Underground Orchid» (named after «Rhizanthella gardneri», a cute, quirky and critically endangered orchid that lives all its life underground) is the sophomore release of Ikizukuri, following the cassette «Hexum» (Zona Watsua, 2019), recorded in the summer of 2020 when the trio at the Sonoscopia cultural center in Porto fellow-Portuguese trumpeter Susana Silva Santos.

True to its name, Ikizukuri, suggests a challenging sonic compound, often one that sounds indigestible, rumbling and thundering, fuming and foaming in the general direction of your own personal throat, leaving no room to escape. The six pieces of «Suicide Underground Orchid» gallop and revolve around free-improvised elements, free jazz, post-rock and metal, but this kind of chaotic, raw and rough compound flows in surprisingly, conversational dynamics.

Santos is a perfect nutrient for the intense and uncompromising grind of «Suicide Underground Orchid», and like Gabriel, Almeida and Costa feeds the nervous, urgent and fiery dynamics, and suggests poetic, lyrical detours with Gabriel mid-piece on «Wealth, to the Poison in the Wash» and on «In the we some, no S can though» and «I a an failures». Costa’s post-production electronics intensify even further the unsettling and brutal atmosphere of this album, and Ikizukuri and Santos explode in a decadent and noisy yet infectious onslaught on the last piece «The and flesh his resources».

Eyal Hareuveni

Julius Gabriel (ss), Gonçalo Almeida (b), Gustavo Costa (dr, electronic post-prod), Susana Santos Silva (tp)