Delighted and honoured to be able to release this previously unheard recording of phenomenal Japanese drummer and percussionist, Toshi Tsuchitori with his Spiral Arms group and the New Gamelan Ensemble. Recorded in November 1998 at the Setagaya Public Theater in Tokyo, and fully restored and mastered for this release, the set offers 25 minutes of hypnotically galvanising, joyously multilayered, percussive catharsis, which ebbs and flows, whirls and dances, before building to a truly transcendent peak.
In 1998, Toshi Tsuchitori and Spiral Arms were invited to an Art Summit in Jakarta, Indonesia, and asked to perform with Indonesian musicians, with three musician participating from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Surakarta. After collaborating and performing in Indonesia, the group came to Japan for a concert together; a visceral, charged performance which this recording documents.
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Spiral Arms
- Toshi Tsuchitori / kuretuzumi
- Yoshinori Marui / oo-kuretuzumi
- Chang Kwang-Hae / kuretuzumi, kengari
- Kae Asakura / kuretuzumi
- Masaharu Yamawaki / guembri
Indonesian New Gamelan Ensemble
- Rahayu Supanggah / rabab, rebana
- Al Swardi / serunekanee, rebana, original self-made instruments: jalenthir, thering, virander
- Nyoman Sukerna / suling, gundel, gamelan gong
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC
Tracklisting:
1. IKAI (Another World) - part 1 - 11.09
2. IKAI (Another World) - part 2 - 5.34
3. IKAI (Another World) - part 3 - 9.28
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Composition by Toshi Tsuchitori, Rahayu Spanggah
Live concert 2nd November 1998 at Setagaya Public Theater Tokyo
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Mastered by Oli Barrett
Cover design by Oli Barrett
Toshi Tsuchitori, born in 1950 in the Japanese prefecture of Kagawa, began playing the traditional Japanese drums at an early age. Since the Seventies, he has performed internationally with specialists of free form improvisation such as Milford Graves, Steve Lacy, Derek Baily and others. In 1976, he worked with Peter Brook’s theatre group for the first time and has since written the music for the productions of “Ubu“, “The Conference of the Birds“, “Los“, “The Mahabharata“, “The Tempest“ and “The Tragedy of Hamlet“. He has studied traditional music styles of around the globe and presents the results of his research into the earliest manifestations of Japanese music with which he deals since ten years at his performances. A series of prehistoric Japanese sounds under the titles “Dotaku“, “Sanukaito“ and „Jomonko“ were published under his name as well as two books: His autobiography, “Spiral Arms”, and a study on prehistoric Japanese music entitled ”The Sounds of Jomon“.
Japanese percussion group, Spiral Arms is led by world percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori. The group mainly perform with the Japanese ancient drums called Kuretuzumi, which were originally only used in 6th~7th century Japan for the mask dance called Gigaku at that time. After this period, this drum completely disappeared from the Japanese music scene. Toshi Tsuchitori commissioned the reconstruction of these drums by a specialist Japanese drum maker, after which we formed the group, Spiral Arms to perform with these drums. The group consisted of Japanese and Korean-Japanese musicians.
