Japan's Lajos Ishibashi-Brons is the main man behind the Gate project. (Gate is written as two Xs inside two vertical bars)
It is true that after his solo release No Exit (2009) he worked on a second album called Iterations with Taka, a Dutchman, who played mostly wind instruments (e.g. sax, flute) but Deconstructed is back to being, to all intents and purposes, a one man project.
This matter is complicated, however, by the fact that, strictly speaking, Deconstructed is not an album of new material at all. Instead, it consists of 're-mixes' or, more accurately, 'reconstructions' of the original recording sessions for Iterations. i.e. recordings made with Taka.
The plot thickens in that while the source material for the two albums is the same, the approach to the material is quite different.
For Iterations, the seven track titles were numbers with the suffix 'E' to denote the fact that they were edits from much longer improvisations. Aside from this editing, the recordings themselves were not altered in any way. The objective was to try to convey a methodology that adopted a 'free', unrehearsed approach to music.
While the duo took inspiration from 'free jazz', the finished work was more like abstract ambient music.
On Deconstructed, greater liberties are taken with the material from the session recordings. Lajos took loops of short fragments of sound and then layered these from four to sixty times.
Since tracks were re-mixed in this way the letter R is added to the numbered titles. The letter 'R' actually stands for 'reconstruction', mainly because 'remix' implies a more conventional process.
One small deviation to this formula of reconstructing studio tracks is on 81.UR in which the 'U' identifies it as an unplugged recording (made on a hill top in a park).
As you will have gathered, of you have read this far and are not completely bored or confused, the music on this album is not intended to be of the easy-listening or comforting background variety.
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Deconstructed is a much denser and disquieting record than Iterations. Any traces of jazz that you may have taken from the previous album are now all but wholly buried in a noise blur.
Only two numbers (55 and 72) exist in both 'E' (edit) and 'R' (reconstructed) formats. On Iterations, 55E lasts for over nineteen minutes, on Deconstructed, 55R is two about five minutes of a doom laden industrial drone. Such is my dedication to duty, I have listened to 55Eand 55R back to back and can assure you that there are no similarities. (the same goes for 72).
On Deconstructed, the self explanatory '30 seconds of silence' is the penultimate track before the closing eighteen minutes worth of 57R It is a brief respite in over an hour's worth of disquieting ambient music
It strikes me that making abstract re-recordings of material that is already abstract in the first place is a process that could be continued to infinity. Lajos may just have found his life's work.
Ultimately, knowing something of the process and philosophy behind the album will make little difference to the listener's response.
All you really need to know is that if, like me, you have a perverse addiction to drone, doom or noise this is an album you will want to add to your collection.
Gate's Website
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