3CD Boxset + Booklet – 901 Editions

Imagine an apparently chaotic set with four improvisation musicians and tables piled high with mixers, effectors, steel containers, stringed instruments, and microphones of different types, together with various other objects from where to obtain the most disparate sounds. Imagine the musician located in a way to make the most of the spaces, preferably in a way so they can look to each other, each on their own at different points and free to move, something also the audience is able to do. Then, lose yourself in their proliferating, changing, never aimed at forms of fusions of the various elements, although this, clearly, might happen during the performance. The Marginal Consort, namely Kazuo Imai, Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii and Masami Tada, are a Japanese avantgarde free form group, originally born from the East Bionic Symphonia, a combo that already in 1976 published an album for ALM Records. All the members, also including Chie Mukai, who acted only in the first activities of the group, were music students of Takehisa Kosugi, at the Tokyo art school Bigakkō in the mid-seventies and since 1997 until now they are taking at least an annual concert, usually in broad spaces and for a duration not less than three hours. It is “a form of sound that does not transform into music, a group that does not produce harmony or even individual concepts”, Kazuo Imai says. He also underlines that the sounds are “phenomena separately produced, and their accumulation constitutes the whole”. 06 06 16 documents one of these concerts, directly recorded at the Berlin St. Elisabeth Kirche, in their first show in Germany, an event introduced by Manuela Benetton on June 6th 2016, in partnership with PAN and 33-33. Initially, the concerts of Marginal Consort were taking place only in Japan, and the proofs of these performances were just a few releases on cult labels, as P.S.F. or the Improvised Music From Japan. In recent years the ensemble has also begun to organize events in Europe and other publications on Pan and Meenna have arrived. So, this release by Fabio Perletta’s 901 Editions is very welcome. The label is focused on the experimental music and the contemporary art in a broad range of influences, and with its commitment it proves an authentic research, primigenial and essential, an example of radicality, coherence and constancy also for the future generations. If “today the sense of the word music is equivocal”, we still quote Kazuo Imai, this kind of recording reconcile us with the contemporaneity and with the idea of future that still comes to us from a conceptual and avantgarde approach.

 

Marginal Consort マージナル・コンソート – 06 06 16 (St. Elisabeth Kirche, Berlin)