Keiji Haino + Shuta Hasunuma - U TA

Uber contemporary collaboration between the legendary Keiji Haino and modular synth experimentalist Shuta Hasunuma, first performed in 2021 following their initial pre-pandemic meeting and now granted a formal release via Temporal Drift. Haino is a renowned shapeshifter of a writer and performer, and proves especially elastic here, providing improvised vocals without any prior understanding of the music Hasunuma was to make. The results are perhaps a lot more sedate than you might first assume, Haino almost in balladeer-like form, while a patchwork array of ambient electronics, subtle guitars, bubbling field recordings and lonely keys amass and then decay around his voice. Haino's vocal is characteristically ghostly, and Hasunuma seems to possess a great understanding of how to accentuate that quality, creating a sense of purgatorial liminality that echoes aspects of The Caretaker's lost-world drift and Jim O'Rourke's various solo collaborations (think Lifetime of a Flower perhaps) with a little added bite. As enriching and enveloping as it is unexpected.      
 
FFO: Eiko Ishibashi/Jim O'Rourke, The Caretaker, Patrick Shiroishi, Rashad Becker