Mitsuhisa Sakaguchi - [sensitive]

edition of 300

Ranking alongside Andrew Chalk and Suishou No Fune as amongst the most instantly gripping releases on An'Archives (high bar as it is) is this debut vinyl outing by Japanese keyboardist/synth player, Mitsuhisa Sakaguchi. While this is the first time Sakaguchi's work has appeared on wax, he's certainly no newcomer, with a wide ranging history of digital output, collaboration and live performance that extends back some 15-20 years. How [sensitive] factors into that history would take someone more au fait with the artist than I to judge, but what is clear is just how commanding an understanding Sakaguchi has of ambient aesthetics, adeptly moving between electro-acoustic improvisations, subtle arrangements of field recordings and a bracing interplay between dissonance and beauteous sonority. More to the point, there's an inherent avant garde instinct that underpins Sakaguchi's practice, which ends up steering [sensitive] in less expected directions, devoid of the politeness that characterises a great deal of contemporary ambient composition and pushing it into more decidedly less easy listening realms of both classic minimalism (think Stockhausen and Cage) and noise-adjacent free-thinking. As such, it's a record that's equally challenging as it can be pretty, but is crucially never ornamental.  
 
FFO: Iannis Xenakis, Andrew Chalk, Alva Noto/Ryuichi Sakamoto, Felicia Atkinson