CDレビュー: "Infinite Flowers" :
VITAL 436 2004

Some time ago, in June, few Japanese improvisers were in Macedonia. One of them was Yoshio Machida, and they all played in 2 cities, Bitola and Skopje, and you can read something about that in this month's Wire on their Global Ear page. In Skopje they played with one Macedonian musician Oliver Josifovski (a former member of the band Foltin), a fine double-bass player who in this occasion played on that instrument + contact microphones attached on it. Everyone of the 5 musicians played a solo set first, presenting their set-up and music, and at the end they played altogether. Yoshio's solo part was the most quiet of all, with kinda fragile electro-acoustic sound (with a strong accent on the acoustic side) from his self-designed steel-pan and Max/MSP on the lap-top. The live sound I heard from Yoshio then was quite different compared with the studio sound of his album Infinite Flowers which I heard later. That's probably mainly because when Yoshio played live he was alone playing on both steel-pan and lap-top, and on the album almost all of the pieces are made by collaborative playing with Tetsuro Yasunaga on electronics and Keiichi Sugimoto on guitar (both members of Minamo), and Yoshio plays steel pan, steel guitar and electronics. The sound is calm and somewhere between ambient and improvised music, or improv music that sounds like ambient, a successful cross-over of both. Relaxing and easy-listening. What I miss on this album are some more edgy moments, it's improvised music and I'd like it to be more unusual and strange. But nevertheless, it works alright here even without that, I think it would be nice if Yoshio goes even more into the ambient direction with his music and set-up as they are here. That works best for me in the tracks Fragrance 1 & 2. Subtle improv music that sounds like nice ambient. (BR)