Taku Sugimoto
Encyclopedia
Japanese people
The are an ethnic group originating in the Japanese archipelago and are the predominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries...
guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
ist.
He initially gained attention in the late 1990s for his restrained, melodic playing, unusual in the world of free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
. Critic Bruce Russell describes this era of Sugimoto's music by writing: "Sugimoto is perhaps the pre-eminent stylist on the guitar ... He brings a golden glow to every session he partakes in, having abandoned amped up noise in favour of a much more introspective and calligraphic style of play."http://erstwhilerecords.com/catalog/005_reviews.html
Around 2002 his music became increasingly abstract, all but eliminating melody and featuring extended periods of silence.
He has collaborated with other Japanese musicians involved in the Onkyo
Onkyokei
The Onkyo music movement or is a form of free improvisation, emerging from Japan in the late 1990s. Onkyō places much more emphasis on sound texture than on musical structure, distilling elements of techno, noise, and electronic music into a unique hybrid.The Off Site, a venue in Tokyo, is home...
movement, such as Sachiko M
Sachiko M
Sachiko Matsubara, who usually records as Sachiko M, is a Japanese musician, but she considers herself to be a "non-musician".She was a member of Otomo Yoshihide's Ground Zero from 1994 to 1997, where she used a sampler. More recently, she has concentrated on music made from sine waves...
, Toshimaru Nakamura
Toshimaru Nakamura
Toshimaru Nakamura is a Japanese musician, active in free improvisation and Japanese onkyo.He began his career playing rock and roll guitar, but gradually explored other types of music, even abandoning guitar and started working on circuit bending...
and Otomo Yoshihide. He has also collaborated with musicians from European free improvisation scenes, notably trombonist Radu Malfatti
Radu Malfatti
Radu Malfatti is an Austrian trombone player and composer. He was born in Innsbruck, in the province of Tyrol, on December 16, 1943. He has been described as "among the leaders in redefining the avant-garde as truly on-the-edge art." His work "since the early nineties.....
and guitarist Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the hugely influential AMM in the mid-1960s and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums...
.