With What Happened There, legends of Japanese avant-garde music Keiji Haino and Natsuki Tamura come together for a wild set of jagged and intriguing improvised music that is a thrilling journey into the minds and approaches of two left-field virtuosos.
Guitarist Haino has been experimenting, improvising and collaborating with other underground artists for decades at this point. His work has seen him traverse psychedelia, drone, noise and more, working with other sonic experimentalists like noise pioneer Merzbow, an artist who is definitely not for the faint hearted.
Natsuki Tamura is an equally renowned musician in underground circles. An astonishing improviser on the trumpet, it seems natural that he and Haino should come together for a session. Recorded live at the Shinjuku Pit Inn Tokyo, the set is presented as one piece in four numbered sections. Haino is on guitar and vocals throughout, while Tamura, alongside his trumpet, provides vocals and plays ‘toys’ – seemingly a series of bells, bits of metal and almost anything else that will make a noise.
The album is a rollercoaster of experimentation. It is at times lyrical and soft, at times barbed and abrasive, and often slightly absurd in a good way. As is often the case with great improvisational music, the listener is always unsure of what might happen next.
‘Part two’ sees the wandering trumpet work of Tamura take over from the staccato guitar stabs and yelped vocals of Haino, before screamed vocals consume the track. It’s an audacious take on free-improvisational sound.
On ‘part three’, strange abstract noises, presumably extracted from one of Tamura’s toys, cut through the sporadic guitar sounds and vocalisations, before the return of Tamura’s trumpet provides a welcome tonal shift part way through this section of the piece. Further abstract sounds, this time apparently the squeaker from a child’s cuddly toy, intersect with some of the more melodic guitar passages on the set.
The final leg of the piece sees Haino’s guitar morph into shuddering walls of sound before breaking away to leave feedback and percussion. The piece ends with Tamura once more picking up the trumpet and demonstrating the quality of his playing with some of his most affecting work across the entire set.
Experienced live in a small Tokyo venue, this meeting of avant-garde masters would have been a brain-melting and all-encompassing experience. The next best thing is hearing it on record. This sort of wild avant-garde experimentalism will never be for everybody. It’s difficult, knotty and eschews traditional musical structure. That said, for anyone wanting to hear two underground sonic adventurers bouncing off each other across the course of an improvised full-length piece – this is not to be missed!