Improv album from the Schubert-Uchihashi-Kugel trio called Black Holes Are Hard To Find (NEMU RECORDS nemu 028), of interest to me personally mainly for the guitar work of Kazuhusa Uchihashi (although the drummer Kugel’s pretty rowdy too). Although it’s omitted from the press note, Kazuhusa Uchihashi was leader of Altered States in Japan, everyone’s favourite trio who energised the Zenbei Record and God Mountain labels in the mid-1990s with their try-anything hyper-speed music, refusing to draw lines between improv, jazz, and rock, even embracing prog-rock moves in their musical bulldozer worldview. Plus he played in Ground-Zero and made records with Ruins, Fred Frith, and Hans Reichel.
On this record, it’s the Japanese player who shines for me personally when they let him off the leash, and his electric-guitar / electronics contributions don’t just sound strange, but they embody very able and intricate playing, and exhibit his innate gift for making complex instant compositions. In fact if this had been a duet record with drummer Klaus Kugel (German all-rounder who’s played some dates with Joe McPhee and Sabir Mateen) then John Zorn might have been quaking in his boots a bit more. Sounds like I’m about to stick the carving knife into the ribs of Frank Paul Schubert, the amiable alto and soprano saxman, but his melodic figures and his very even blowing tone are doing a lot to counter-balance the more outer-space leanings of the Japanese axeman. Even so, this album turns dreary very quickly, despite the focussed way in which our threesome patiently explore their abstract zones and imaginary dramas; there’s a real lack of tension in the group playing, not quite enough interaction, and the record could be perceived as three different sound-events simply wafered together.
The rather “polished” production sound doesn’t help either, most of the rough edges and distortions all smoothed out, a problem which is not unrelated to the slick presentation of the package with its bland cover image, its user-friendly group shot, and ambitious titles such as ‘Explosive Past’ or ‘Supersonic Interaction’, making verbal promises which the music fails to deliver. A shade too much self-indulgence in pursuing this or that line of enquiry, following avenues of which some may not lead anywhere. In 73:33 mins of music, a quality half-hour album is struggling to get out. (12/12/2022)