(Free Improvisation, Electroacoustic) [WEB] Koboku Senju (Martin Taxt, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Eivind Lonning, Espen Reinertsen) - Joining The Queue To Become One Of These Ordinary Ghosts - 2013, FLAC (tracks), lossless

All music by Koboku Senju
Performed live at Cafeteateret, Oslo, August 31st 2011
Recorded by Morten Brekke Stensland
Mixed/mastered by Toshimaru Nakamura
Cover design and artwork by Rutger Zuydervelt
Liner notes by David Sylvian:
If we're susceptible to the power of suggestion then, taking the title of this album as our lead, we're moving amongst a 'selection of dead trees' towards our own demise. We wake in the wee small hours of the morning, not in the comforting melancholy of a mournful Sinatra but amidst the anxiety and madness as exhibited by Max Von Sydow's Johan Borg in Bergman's 'The Hour of the Wolf'. The forest is dark and the shadows voluminous and empty. Our own shadows startle us with an unfamiliar hostility. Wild life, as we call it, the dark majesty, the imposing immateriality of the feathered and furred, speak in one common tongue. We've traveled a long way from the harmonious comforts of home to the fringes, the outer reaches, the discordant ramblings of our own minds where reason gives way to intuition. We're a dichotomy fluctuating between the feral and pure spirit. Freud's 'every phobia a fear of our own thoughts'. We leave our pasts behind that we might merge with the darkness. Devolution reveals itself as possible evolution. We reject the language known in favour of the primal, the savage tone. Until now, unsounded, snared. Senses heightened, straddling the breach between life and death, are we ready now? "I thank you that the limit has finally been transgressed. The mirror has been shattered. But what do the splinters reflect? Can you tell me that?" The words drift in the half-light, indifferent to our predicament, we are but ordinary ghosts, life and death, two sides of the same coin. Our unknowing greater than the sum of our knowledge. Listen and respond in your true voice, acutely aware that all responses are inclined to failure. From whisper to primal scream, there are degrees of fear, of recognition and awareness, of desperation and surrender. Listening, a participatory, creative act. Listen, there's no such thing as silence. We are haunted, internally possessed. We're the void waiting to be filled. We are the haunted and the haunting. "You do not see us, but we see you”. "Listen", she said, "l'll only repeat myself once, there's no such thing as silence”. -
David Sylvian, November 2012
I feel as though I’m stuck in a cramped elevator; brass and woodwind grunt and gasp as they shuffle to release trapped limbs, feedback sets every surrounding wall into unsteadying vibration, thin strips of noisy electronics writhe through any slight gap they can find. The sound is far too close for comfort, and there’s something rather ugly about having twangs of string and thumbing of saxophone buttons rubbing right up against my head. The end of the piece isn’t denoted by a graceful descent into silence, but by an unglamorous “peeling away” process, whereby the intimate congealment of improvisation starts to unstick and fall limp around me. Nasty.
It’s not until part two that the record starts to sound like the live recording it actually is, though the introduction of gaps and open space during the first few minutes doesn’t render the experience any less uncomfortable. The suffocating cloth of dissonance is replaced by a restless concoction of wooden string scrapes and breathy woodwind pops, clammy with a dreadful anticipation, which eventually bursts open under colonic tuba drones that resounds like a steam vessel coming in to dock. “Listen, there’s no such thing as silence,” says David Sylvian during the liner notes. “We are haunted, internally possessed. We’re the void waiting to be filled. We are the haunted and the haunting.” On Joining The Queue…, life and mortality feel as imposing and inescapable as such statements imply. - attnmagazine.co.uk

Martin Taxt - tuba
Tetuzi Akiyama - guitar
Toshimaru Nakamura - no-input mixing board
Eivind Lonning - trumpet
Espen Reinertsen - saxophone