Taku SUGIMOTO
“Septet”

Guitarist Taku Sugimoto continues his long-term musical activities, with a focus on composing, and also collaborates closely with some of the composers in the Wandelweiser Group. This release is one of the summits of his recent work.
Septet is a work of just under 40 minutes, performed by seven musicians on clarinet, flute, viola, contrabass, cello, electric guitar and sine-tones. Throughout, numerous diffuse sound reverberations emerge and overlap, then fade away. The sound progression is simple and unhurried, but the work is permeated with tension from start to finish. A masterpiece. This is the live recording of the work’s world premiere in Berlin in March 2015. The performers are Rebecca Lane (flute), Michael Thieke (clarinet), Johnny Chang (viola), Koen Nutters (contrabass), Derek Shirley (cello), Taku Sugimoto (electric guitar) and Bryan Eubanks (sine-tones).
“This composition is conceived of as a sort of double concertino for clarinet, flute, and small ensemble. However, the two main instruments, clarinet and flute, make no melody: the one tone is shared and repeated by them. I want to have the other instruments (viola, cello, contrabass, guitar, and sine-tone generator) work as if they are drawing several spectrums with the sound of the clarinet or flute, so each of these instruments has a specific set of microtones to play. In order to make it easier to produce those microtones, the stringed instruments are tuned anomalously; only harmonics or open strings are played. The very low frequencies are produced only by the sine-tone generator, since these frequencies are too low to play with any musical instrument except piano.” T. S.