Avant Music News (.COM)

The Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media celebrated ten years of being and doing in 2013. Among the celebrants were Ryuichi Sakamoto, Illuha (the duo of Tomoyoshi Date and Corey Fuller) and that most eminent small sound handler, Taylor Deupree (12k is his label). An ostensibly informal entertainment improvised on piano, guitar, pump organ, and synthesizers made enough of a “third mind” impression, that the four of them decided to preserve it for grateful listeners across the world.

A lesson in listening. Despite the fact that comparisons to Eno and Budd lie close at hand – Sakamoto is of course such a pianist – it is Eno´s Neroli that Perpetual calls most often to mind (that is, when it isn´t calling Thursday Afternoon to mind) on “Movement, 1”. As if it were used as a template…

Exquisite ambience threatens to float you blissfully away, but microscopic, almost transparent, amniotic things are happening and they crave your attention. Children are at play in “Movement, 1,” and someone, not the children I suspect, is playing with blocks. Not ordinary blocks. Detail is of the essence to this quartet. A guitar is picked up by a signal receiver and scrambles its message. Static turns into a rain of hobnails.

“Movement, 2” begins with movement inside the piano, notes being nipped in their respective buds, before further mechanical adjustments are made to the internal braces of its engine. Butterfingers drop a tool, a coin falls out of his breast pocket. A nectarous, wavering tone hovers, biding its time. Shards of frozen tears, fabric rustles impatiently. The wavering tone resolves itself back into Enoness.

Final, third movement, slides down Sakamoto´s sweet axis, at its root excavations are being conducted. It gets sweaty. Birds are more than a little annoyed, field workers scribble notes assiduously. The odd sour note says, Put a ring around its tiny leg and release it back into the wild.