Taku Sugimoto
Taku Sugimoto is a Japanese guitarist. He initially gained attention in the late 1990s for his restrained, melodic playing, unusual in the world of free improvisation. Around 2002 his music became increasingly abstract, all but eliminating melody and featuring extended periods of silence. He has collaborated with other Japanese musicians involved in the Onkyo movement, such as Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide. He has also collaborated with musicians from European free improvisation scenes, notably trombonist Radu Malfatti and guitarist Keith Rowe.
Taku Sugimoto is a Japanese guitarist. He initially gained attention in the late 1990s for his restrained, melodic playing, unusual in the world of free improvisation. Around 2002 his music became increasingly abstract, all but eliminating melody and featuring extended periods of silence. He has collaborated with other Japanese musicians involved in the Onkyo movement, such as Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide. He has also collaborated with musicians from European free improvisation scenes, notably trombonist Radu Malfatti and guitarist Keith Rowe.
Chamber music
Taku Sugimoto has been one of the most important musicians on the improv-front for some years now with releases on Erstwhile, Grob, A Bruit Secret, Improvised Music From Japan and many other labels. Redefining guitar music with his ultra minimal way of playing, the most extreme endpoint for this was the Taku Sugimoto Guitar Quartet album released earlier on Bottrop-Boy. On Chamber Music he puts the guitar aside and composes 3 pieces for violin, cello and piano. He recreates the same sustained so…
Futatsu
Vienna resident Radu Malfatti, who turns 60 in December, is a trombonist and composer with a long and impressive career. In the nineties he established the unique compositional/improvisational style, using very few sounds, that he continues to develop. Thirty-something guitarist Taku Sugimoto has since the late nineties followed a similar path, pursuing a playing style marked by extreme sonic spareness. His work has received critical acclaim in Japan and abroad and has greatly influenced many yo…
The world turned upside down
A document of a performance last autumn at Parisian Improv spot Instants Chavires, in which Günter Müller is flanked by two very different but distinctive users of the electric guitar. On one side of the stage is Keith Rowe, who's worked for half a lifetime to unsettle the boundaries between music and noise. On the other is the restrained presence of Taku Sugimoto, whose crabbed phrases waft above the shifting timbral networks laid down by the other two. The trio's music is dominated by rasps an…