The Japanese experimental electroacoustic duo KAKUHAN – producer and electronics player Koshiro Hino (a founding member of the Osaka-based experimental band Goat and owner of the NAKID label) and cellist Yuki Nakagawa – produces Autechre-tinged, free improvised music with obsessive, micro-edited precision, rhythmic patterns. After the release of its debut album, Metal Zone (NAKID, 2022), KAKUHAN was invited to perform live at the 2023 edition of Unsound festival in Kraków. KAKUHAN was offered the opportunity to collaborate with a local musician and decided to work with Polish percussionist and musicologist Adam Gołębiewski, a veteran improviser who’s performed and recorded with Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Mats Gustafsson, and Ken Vandermark.

The aptly-titled Repercussions is the outcome of this collaboration, recorded shortly after the successful free improvised performance in a single session at KPD Studio in Kraków in October 2023 and offering ten untitled pieces. Gołębiewski’s precise and resourceful exploration of the cymbals’ timbres, often with bows and objects, punctuated KAKUHAN stuttering electronic rhythmic samples and beats with surprisingly acoustic interventions, suggesting stimulating tension and pushing the collaboration to extreme, sound-oriented, dissonant, and otherworldly territories. The cover artwork by Polish artist Alicja Pakosz captures Gołębiewski’s precise sonic interventions.

As this album progresses, KAKUHAN and Gołębiewski enrich and vary their rhythmic dynamics, exploring unpredictable yet more nuanced, atmospheric, and strangely lyrical textures that are also ambient and drone-like. Repercussions offers an elusive, wild ride that constantly juggles between harmony and dissonance, control and chaos, or the acoustic and the electronically produced and sampled sounds.

Eyal Hareuveni

Koshiro Hino (electronics), Yuki Nakagawa (cello), Adam Gołębiewski (drums, objects)