Nakamura, one of the organizers of the Tokyo free-improvisation series Meeting at Off Site, plays what he terms the "no-input mixing board," creating and manipulating feedback loops exclusively with an audio mixer. Sachiko M, who formerly played in the visceral sampler-based rock band Ground Zero, deserves the Ripeness of Metaphor award for her "sampler with sine wave"; the instrument is basically a sampler used without any memory -- isn't there an undiscovered Philip K. Dick short story about this? -- relying instead on the instrument's sine-wave test tones and whatever incidental noise comes into play. Do is distinguished by piercing high-frequency feedback that doesn't abate until twenty-four minutes into the first track. Listened to at low volume, do could pass for a distant relative of your computer's constant, high-frequency whine. You're going to have to crank it up to a decent volume -- this is where your ears get fried -- to catch the subtle interplay of these two improvisers, notably a rhythmic tattoo suggesting the hollowest, loneliest beatbox that never was and the delicate beating patterns of crossing, very high-pitched glissandi. There aren't too many records that sound like this.
     While not the radical listening experience of first hearing, for example, AMM or Bernhard Günter's Un peu de neige salie, there are grounds for comparison to the extent that do suggests an idiom unto itself. My only gripe is that the suggestive strangeness of the way in which this music was made is undercut by the literalness of saddling it with artwork representing a visual analogue, namely the product of a no-input video synthesizer. Why not a car or sunset or loaf of bread?
     The abovementioned discrepancy between Morton Feldman's music in performance and in recorded form is most likely true of dach, a live recording of the improvising trio of Phil Durrant (violin), Thomas Lehn (synthesizer), and Radu Malfatti (trombone). Judging by the ambient noise that the label's promotional text identifies as rain upon a roof -- bringing to mind one of Derek Bailey's great recordings, the trio of him, Butoh dancer Min Tanaka, and rain on a glass roof -- I'm assuming that in performance this was extraordinarily quiet, intimate music. Where it's not unheard-of for improvisers to incorporate field recordings in performance -- let's call them "kitchen sink improvisers," an entity utterly apart from the strictness and stillness of this trio -- dach, itself very "field recording," renders the ambiance of the performance space in striking detail. This is one of the most engrossing aspects of this engaging, atypical recording.
     As a whole, dach is reminiscent of first encountering recordings of free improvised music of the late '60s -- AMM, Music Improvisation Company, Spontaneous Music Ensemble -- and never being sure I was hearing the same record twice. I found myself warming to it immediately.