Wada, Yoshi - Off the Wall
SKU
05-EM1078
Totally cool & weird album (one of only two albums I know about and the best of the two, imo) by this Japanese composer/instrument maker who was part of FLUXUS, moved to NYC for a while and made these weird, unique, bagpipe/reed-like instruments that were force-fed air by a compressor! LONG tones, obviously. Never before on CD, this was released on the free jazz-oriented FMP/SAJ label and has been unavailable for a couple of decades. Conditionally highly recommended if you dig the BIG drone! Contains full liner notes and photos of the instruments.
"A minimalist yet majestic monsterpiece ("massive," as Tom Johnson declares in his perceptive liner notes), Off The Wall features Wada and Wayne Hankin on bagpipes, Marilyn Bogerd on adapted organ, and percussionist Andreas Schmidt-Neri. The original album consisted of two side-long pieces recorded on successive days by Jost Geber, who captured the power and dynamics of the quartet without losing the meditative delicacy of the bagpipes and the intricacy of their interplay with the homemade organ (constructed by Wada), resulting in a slowly-evolving mosaic of combination tones and overtones. Simultaneously static yet changing, rooted and ethereal, homespun and alien, ancient and very modern, the music is created entirely with acoustic instruments but has "electronic" textures at times, yet is very warm and human, always pulsing, shifting and mutating. Em Records is pleased indeed to release Off The Wall for the first time ever on CD, with the bonus track "Die Konsonanten Pfeifen," a slightly earlier recording with Wada and Hankin on bagpipes and Kevin Newhoff on percussion, originally released as a cassette."