Category Archives: free improv

taku sugimoto | opposite (1998)

Posted on March 19, 2018 by Ed Howard

1997 was a pivotal year for Taku Sugimoto. He recorded two more albums in the first half of the year, further honing the gentle aesthetic he’d been increasingly exploring on his other recent projects. Though the electric album Flagments of … Continue reading →

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taku sugimoto | myshkin musicu for electric guitar (1996)

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Ed Howard

Taku Sugimoto’s second full-length solo guitar album (following 1988’s very different Mienai Tenshi) finds him moving more conclusively towards the spacious, searching sound that would come to define his playing through the early years of the 2000s. The 3″ EP … Continue reading →

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taku sugimoto | alto (1995)

Posted on March 8, 2018 by Ed Howard

After 1994’s Slub: Unaccompanied Violoncello Solo, Taku Sugimoto stopped playing the cello, to which he’d devoted the past few years, and returned to the electric guitar. The resulting 20-minute 3″ CD, again released on Sugimoto’s own Slub Music label, was … Continue reading →

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taku sugimoto | slub: unaccompanied violoncello solo (1994)

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Ed Howard

It’s hard to imagine now, but like many of the young Japanese musicians who contributed to the turn-of-the-millennium Tokyo-based minimalist scene, Taku Sugimoto did not start his musical career with the restraint and patience for which he eventually became known. … Continue reading →

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evan parker / derek bailey / han bennink | the topography of the lungs (1970)

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Ed Howard

The Topography of the Lungs is one of the crucial early documents of European free improvisation. Recorded in July 1970, this lively, inventive trio record introduced a decade in which European free jazz would increasingly splinter from its American progenitors, … Continue reading →

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musica elettronica viva | friday (1969)

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Ed Howard

Musica Elettronica Viva was an odd and amorphous group whose vision of collective free improvisation, like that of their British peers AMM, presaged many of the developments of avant music in the ’70s and beyond. The group’s membership shifted constantly … Continue reading →

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spontaneous music ensemble | karyobin (1968)

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Ed Howard

The Spontaneous Music Ensemble was one of the first flowerings of a fertile British improvised music scene that would flourish through the ’70s and beyond. The SME was a loose collective centered around drummer John Stevens and, in its first … Continue reading →

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amm | ammmusic (1966)

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Ed Howard

This extraordinary debut has become a legend, and with good reason. The importance of AMMMusic is difficult to overstate, particularly when considered as a prescient forerunner to certain strains of electroacoustic improvisation that would develop at the end of the … Continue reading →

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