"Guitarist, composer and improviser Taku Sugimoto frequently performs overseas as well as in Japan. He's also a member of the Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, which consists of five Japanese musicians. Stefan Thut is a Swiss cellist and composer. Both Sugimoto and Thut are known as unique performers and composers, and both have close ties with the contemporary classical Wandelweiser group. The two have a long association, performing together when Sugimoto visits Switzerland and when Thut comes to Japan. Sugimoto and Thut performed in Geneva and Basel during Sugimoto's 2015 European tour. (They'd previous collaborated in larger formations, but this was their first duo performance.) The concert in Basel on March 21 is documented on this CD. The duo of Thut (cello) and Sugimoto (guitar) performed Thut's 2015 composition "Ten Strings, 1-24" (which includes the sound of rolling dice) and Sugimoto's 2014 composition "Mada." The two pieces (each about 25 minutes long) are presented here as a single 49-minute track instead of separate tracks. (Thut's piece is heard before Sugimoto's.) Each work displays the special character of these two highly individual composers, whose performances on this collaboration album are endlessly fascinating."-Ftarri

Three discs (well, four actually) [1 | 2 | 3] of duet improvisations, each involving a Japanese musician playing with a European musician. I started with the one that has Taku Sugimoto on guitar and Stefan Thut on cello, partly because you have to start somewhere (obviously), but also because I haven't heard much new music from Sugimoto in quite some time. Maybe a decade or so ago he seemed more active when it came to releasing music on CD. In March 2015 he played two concert with Swiss cello player Stefan Thut, and they both wrote a piece that included scores; for Thut it was about chance operations and in Sugimoto's piece "the concreteness is manifest as a geometric shape with its own logic". On this disc we find the Basel recording and both pieces are presented as one. Each lasts about twenty-five minutes and it's first Thut and then Sugimoto. Both have ties to the Wandelweiser group, which may be an indication of what to expect; music that is very quiet and has quite a bit of silence between whatever sparse notes are played. The two pieces are quite different. Sugimoto's piece is more about sustaining sounds, on the cello and the ebow on the guitar, but this is all very soft indeed. In Thut's piece we hear the rolling of dice, a pause and a performed short action before the dice are rolled again. By making the dice an integral part of the piece they add an additional sound source and every time the dice are rolled you know something new is going to happen, somehow being however very small. I wish it were all a bit louder, because this sort of quietness asks quite a bit of one's concentration, rewarding as it is."-Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly