Shutsumin documents a live, free improvising meeting of legendary Japanese guitarist and turntables wizard Otomo Yoshihide and generation-younger, autodidact alto and soprano sax and electronics player Kei Matsumaru, recorded at Tokyo’s Pit Inn in April of 2024.
Matsumaru is a native of Palau New Guinea, who moved to Tokyo in 2018 after studying jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He frequently collaborates with artists from other creative disciplines, such as contemporary dance, visual arts, and various media arts. He played in Jim O’Rourke’s performance of Christian Marclay’s graphic score, «To be continued», and is a close collaborator of pianist Eiko Ishibashi, in addition to leading his live, 90-minute acoustic solo saxophone performances in which he explores the relationship between time, space, body, and instrument, and how the performance affects cognition and perception of these elements in both the audience and himself.
Yoshihide, of course, is one of the most influential, fearless, and versatile experimentalists in modern Japan. Yoshihide was impressed by Matsumaru’s debut album, Nothing Unspoken Under the Sun (2020), and invited him to work together. This ongoing collaboration has taken numerous forms, including performances of music by the legendary Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.
Shutsumin captures Yoshihide and Matsumaru in fierce, brain-frying intensity, pushing the sonic envelope of the eight free improvisations to their most extreme, dissonant, surreal, and noisy territories. But these resourceful improvisers have established an immediate, profound dynamics, based on primal, instinctive, and visceral energy and collective aesthetics. Yoshihide and Matsumaru sound as if they already have developed a telepathic connection, and their insightful improvisations incorporate elements of free jazz, feedback-driven noise, abstract metal, minimalist drone (on steroids) and even hip-hop (Matsumaru plays with the local, experimental hip-hop Dos Monos), as well as experiments in otherworldly timbres, without losing the focus and tension, or the nervous, abandonless energy. You may feel that Yoshihide and Matsumaru are possessed by such intense, creative energy that there is no earthly power that can hold them throughout this stimulating, great live set.
Eyal Hareuveni
Otomo Yoshihide (guitar, turntable), Kei Matsumaru (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, electronics)
