Taku Sugimoto, Burkhard Stangl, Christof Kurzmann - In Tokyo: First Concert, Second Take (Musica Genera)

Taku Sugimoto & Annette Krebs - Eine Gitarre ist Eine Gitarre ist Keine Gitarre ist Eine Gitarre (Rossbin)

Andrea Neumann & Burkhard Beins - Lidingö (Erstwhile)

A guitar is a guitar is a guitar, and a piano by any other name would sound just as grand. But is a piano without a frame still a piano? And is a guitar really just a guitar?

Taku Sugimoto has developed a technique reliant upon interfering with the sound-producing mechanisms of his guitar and/or six-string bass. While playing, he deliberately inserts bits of plastic, metal, or foam between the strings, often picking or plucking directly above the obstruction for a blunt, clipped tone. At times, he’ll strike the strings with a bow or one of several tiny mallets. Any part of his guitar is fair game for such treatment, but Sugimoto pays special attention to the taut strings below the bridge or at the neck. Though far from the only guitarist to combine prepared and percussive tactics, Sugimoto is nearly peerless in his ability to preserve such desirable guitarisms as halo-like harmonics and dulcet sonances, while propelling the instrument through less characteristic paces as a percussive implement. In collaborations, Sugimoto has been rightly valued as a melodic complement for the more monochrome textures of Keith Rowe and Kevin Drumm. But he has demonstrated an equal affinity for partners even more melodically inclined than himself, particularly guitarist Burkhard Stangl.

First Concert – Second Take factors Sugimoto into the equation that produced the glorious Schnee (Erstwhile, 2000). Austrians Christof Kurzmann and Stangl rendezvous with Sugimoto at OFF Site, the Tokyo gallery co-founded by Sugimoto (with Toshimaru Nakamura and Utah Kawasaki) as a sanctum of extremely quiet improv. Unsurprisingly, the trio’s first meeting proves to be a splendid occasion. If the harmony between Stangl’s guitar and Kurzmann’s G3 PowerBook neared perfection on Schnee, the trio with Sugimoto achieves it. The first track affords the paired guitarists ample space to work endless, enchanting variations on the sensation of leaves or snowflakes adrift, caught up and carried along—or blown gently off-course—by Kurzmann’s insinuating electronics. But it’s the second section, where Sugimoto, Stangl and Kurzmann conjure a much more unsettling plaint of wind and ghosts, that realizes this potent combo’s true potential.

Eine Gitarre... is Sugimoto’s second duo recording with Annette Krebs, a lesser-known guitarist whose technique is as radical as his own. Krebs extends the tabletop/prepared approach further, playing the guitar by processing its oft- imperceptible resonations through electro-acoustic devices and microphone adjustments. Held up against the exhaustively reduced sounds Krebs extracts from her instrument, Sugimoto almost seems like a classicist. But common to both her anatomization of sound and his deliberate yet musical methods is a fast conviction in rigorously reflective improvisation. Without such perspective, Eine Gitarre... would have amounted to no more than a dreary catalog of experimental-guitar noises. Instead, Krebs’ lithic drones and scrapes and Sugimoto’s painstaking dots and strokes come together in a remarkably lyrical presentation of intersecting aesthetics.

One of Krebs’ first recordings, Rotophormen (Charhizma, 2000), paired her with Andrea Neumann, a Berlin-based pianist with an unusually literal take on instrumental reduction. Neumann found that her piano, though already stripped down to a metal frame specially rigged with electro-acoustic sensors, was too impractical for the travel-light lifestyle of an improviser. She had a more portable version of this “innenklavier” constructed, and has since collaborated with a cadre of international musicians. Lidingö finds Neumann back in Berlin, reunited with percussionist Burkhard Beins, a fellow member of the German electro-acoustic ensemble Phosphor, but dreaming of the Swedish island-city of Lidingö. The personal significance of this imagined Scandinavian sojourn, structured like a journey—complete with arrival, sightseeing side-trips, and a nostalgic coda—is never explained. But the sepia-tone photos of historical railroads and shipyards, forests, and beaches that represent the journey are inviting enough to stir instant longing. Like other notable improvising percussionists, Neumann and Beins exemplify ingenuity. As Neumann works with her unique instrument and a mixing board, she produces sounds that range from the luminous, high-pitched hum of excited steel to abrasive scuffs and rasps. Attention to individual piano strings elicits curiously immaterial tones that waver and ebb, or muted notes that recall Sugimoto’s dampened pluckings. Her more aggressive treatments of the innerklavier coax cavernous rumbles from its vibrating metal frame and growls that match Beins’ bowed, beaten and rubbed strings and things. Between the two of them, they come up with an utterly engrossing array of evocative noises.

gil gershman 2002 dec 13