Japanese throat singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Posuposu Otani returns to 33-33 with ShuHaRi, the follow-up to his acclaimed self-titled debut.
Moving between mountain life and inner space, folk song and altered consciousness, ecological unease and the strange assumptions around which contemporary life is organised, ShuHaRi expands the singular musical world introduced on Otani’s first internationally released album. Born in Kamakura in 1972, Otani began making music in his twenties through punk and home recording on four-track cassette. Time spent in San Francisco’s skateboarding scene and later travels through India and the Republic of Sakha — where encounters with throat singing and the Kohkin became part of his developing musical vocabulary — eventually fed into an approach to songwriting that now feels entirely his own.
From 2006 he became a distinctive presence in the Tokyo and Yokohama underground, closely associated with the experimental community surrounding Kouenji Enban. Yet there remains something strikingly modest about the distance between the originality of Otani’s music and the life from which it emerges. He spends much of his time in the mountains, fly fishing the rivers around his home, and his songs seem to grow from the same patient attention to landscape, people and small shifts in everyday life.
Manchesters Minimum Wage Immanence Unit comprises Adam Fairhall on accordion/harmonium, David Birchall on guitar/banjo and Michael Perrett on bass clarinet.
They improvise music that draws as much on English folk song as it does the timbral integrations of European spectralism and the free drone excursions of Pelt.
Writing in The Wire, Daniel Spicer described their debut CD as “sounding as if Terry Riley had gently commandeered the Bitches Brew sessions before nodding off in the corner”.
DOME RIDERS. Glossolalia guru Fritz Welch was ahead of the curve when he wilfully turned his back on the Texan black gold game and set sail for Scotland on the back of a repurposed petroleum drum to usher in a new Gusher Age of mucus-based green energy music. The upper reaches of this miserable island can now leave them dirty fossil fuel reservoirs untapped as explorers from the mining communities that grew up around Woven Skull, the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra & Taupe have pledged allegiance to the Welchian cause and are employing both archaic string instruments and state o’ the art electronics, while all the while ululating oral oil slicks, to amass a portfolio of audio gasoline so well-lubricated that it threatens to combust inside yr lugholes. Prospectors praying for the occurrence of improvisation that you can bank on should take note, this quartet always strikes gold.
