"Every something is the echo of nothing", said John Cage, the chief advocate of the idea that music is, paradoxically, an investigation into our relationship with silence.
This notion is taken up by Christian Meaas Svendsen, a Norwegian bassist and leader of an improvisational quartet of experimental musicians who take their name from the Japanese word for 'comrade'.
The Zen-like aspects of the sounds can be gleaned from the fact that they call one track Gyodo (the name of a Buddhist ceremony) and another Yugen, a poetic term roughly signifying that language exists beyond the literal meaning of words.
Svendsen states that the the music on the band's debut release "intimately explores the relationship between content and non-content.
Using violin, piano, drums and bass they play what might be broadly termed ambient jazz but it also incorporates elements of noise in the opening track (Gyodo). This consists of 17 and half minutes of a single note grinding out repeatedly like an industrial process on a production line. The intention appears to be to test the listener's pain threshold. There is certainly nothing which offers anything in the way of pleasure or entertainment.
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The other three tracks Empty Day, Yugen and End Point are less headache-inducing but no less enigmatic and curious.
You are faced with the realisation that this is an album which as much about the space between the notes as the music itself. As such, it is more conceptually interesting than aesthetically pleasing.
Singular.
Nakama at Nakama Records website
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