Takehisa Kosugi & Akio Suzuki New Sense Of Hearing

Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, NewSense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, twoluminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms's high-qualityreissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda andmastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo's Aeolian Hall.Described by Suzuki as the "culmination" of their sound,New Sense of Hearing features the twomusicians improvising together in that empty Tokyo theater, Kosugi on vocals, violin, and radiotransmitter and Suzuki on the Analapos, his namesake glass harmonica, spring cong, andkikkokikiriki, all apparatuses of his own invention.Suzuki and Kosugi first met at the city's Minami Gallery in 1976 on the occasion of "Sound Objectsand Sound Tools," an exhibition of Suzuki's homemade instruments. Two years later, at the Festivald'Automne in Paris, Suzuki invited Kosugi to join him for a suite of performances as part of theexhibition "MA: Espace - Temps au Japon," organized by architect Arata Isozaki andcomposer-writer Toru Takemitsu. Suzuki and Kosugi performed together at the Musée des ArtsDécoratifs, Paris, nearly fifty times, honing their approach to mutual improvisation, before travelingwith the exhibition to Stockholm and New York_critic Tom Johnson wrote in the Village Voice thathe had "seldom seen two performers so completely tuned in on the same types of sounds, the sameperformance attitude, the same philosophy, the same sense of what music ought to be."For NewSense of Hearing, the duo reunited in Japan and produced an extraordinary dispatch from theircollaboration of arioso violin, echoing vocals and bangs, and metallic twangs. As Johnson observedin 1979, Kosugi and Suzuki are "in a very subtle artistic world where there can be no directrelationships. . . . Only coincidence."Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a composer, ar...