Tsurumai by Kapotte Muziek & Lethe

Recorded in the industrial city of Nagoya, Japan, Tsurumai is an expansive album of roughly improvised electroacoustic music. Starting from a few small clicks, the music steadily grows outward, uneasily shifting and expanding… the musicians use acoustic sounds (from violin, piano, percussion), closely amplified objects, open circuits and computers, and anything else they could find. Rude bumps interrupt narcotic drones, the telltale human hands of improvisation disappear into a mysterious group sound, elements blur, vision fails, and time stops…

As the name that Dutch artist Frans de Waard used for his solo sound experiments, Kapotte Muziek (literally "broken music") produced cassette tapes and LPs of harsh noise, drones, collages, and whatever else interested him, casting a large shadow over the 1980s international cassette-trading community. Eventually, as he pursued other sonic interests and adjusted his name accordingly - Shifts (for guitar drones), Quest (for ambient techno), and Freiband (computer music) - Kapotte Muziek morphed into the live improvising collaboration of de Waard, Roel Meelkop and Peter Duimelinks. The trio performs by amplifying objects that they discover at whatever space they find themselves performing.

In Nagoya, Kapotte Muziek met up with Kuwyama Kiyoharu, aka Lethe, an omnivorous multi-instrumentalist whose work typically takes advantage of some acoustic peculiarity of the space in which it is recorded. He is one-half of Kuwyama-Kijima, a cello and violin duo whose albums have appeared on the trente oiseaux and Alluvial labels. He has also collaborated with Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel), Masayoshi Urabe, and runs the annual Lethe-Voice Festival in Nagoya.
Tsurumai is Kapotte Muziek’s second CD for Intransitive, following The Use of Recycling in 1998. Lethe also appeared on the compilation Twenty-three.

Former label for experimental-type music. Foolishly founded by Howard Stelzer in 1997, mismanaged for more years than necessary, and finally put out of its misery in 2012. This page exists to keep some titles available.