Taku Sugimoto - h (Another Timbre)

Sugimoto's winning project with singer Minami Saeki, Songs, is the source for this lovely, oddly static work, performed in tandem by the composer and guitarist Cristián Alvear. While those piece were generally short (song length), here Sugimoto takes one, 'h', and elaborates on it for more than 42 minutes. "Elaborates", however, in his own idiosyncratic style.

It's a live recording, from a concert at Ftarri in November 2017, and there's an immediate and welcome sense of the music being embedded in the local atmosphere. The notes come slowly, softly, very songlike, a gentle unhurried cascade of single notes, each player (one presumes) playing the melody at his own pace, allowing new patterns to emerge. That said, there's a kind of hovering stasis in effect, a circulation and rotation around one small but beautiful set of notes, the music never traveling very far at all, but simply observing what can occur given two extremely sensitive instrumentalists approaching the score with high regard.

It's been fascinating to hear Sugimoto's migration from the minimal but "tuneful" music first heard, by me, on 'Opposite' from 1998 to the extraordinarily spare recordings from the mid-2000s (like 'Live in Australia) to the more severe composed pieces from recent years to these current variations, which perhaps harken back to 'Opposite' but with much knowledge gathered int he interim. Not too much more I can say about it in terms of descriptives, only to strongly advise, if you've any interest at all in Sugimoto's music (and Alvear's brilliant playing) to hear this one. Very special.

Another Timbre-