The Wire – Unlimited Editions: Ftarri

Begleitend zu seinem Bericht über Ftarri in The Wire 499 stellt Derek Walmsley eine Playlist mit aktuellen Veröffentlichungen des japanischen Improvisationslabels vor.

Die Tokioter Organisation Ftarri (die aus dem Label Improvised Music From Japan hervorgegangen ist) hat in den letzten 20 Jahren ihren Ruf für hochwertige Improvisations- und Lower-Case-Musik mehrfach unter Beweis gestellt. Neu seit der Covid-19-Pandemie ist jedoch, wie Ftarri weiter expandiert und innovativ ist, indem es viele Aufnahmen aus seinem eigenen Laden mit Veranstaltungsraum in Tokio veröffentlicht und mit gleichgesinnten Partnern aus der ganzen Welt zusammenarbeitet, die überall spielen, von einer Unterführung in Peking bis zu einem High-End-Studio in der Schweiz. „Die Zahl der Musiker aus Übersee, die nach Japan kommen, hat dramatisch zugenommen“, bemerkt Chef Yoshiyuki Suzuki. Dadurch verfügt das Label nun über einen großen Pool an Ensembles, mit denen es zusammenarbeiten kann, und ist in der Lage, Überraschungen zu bieten, die einen Teil der Frische und Kraft bewahren, die für die Ethik der improvisierten Musik von zentraler Bedeutung sind. Die letzten Jahre gehörten zu den geschäftigsten in der Geschichte von Ftarri, mit mehr als 20 Veröffentlichungen, die 2023 und 2024 über die verschiedenen Sublabels des Labels erschienen sind.

Die hier vorgestellten Musikauswahlen können alle über die Bandcamp-Seite von Ftarri angehört werden, die einen detaillierten Überblick über die Aktivitäten des Labels bietet und eine wunderschöne Galerie mit den farbenfrohen Albumcovern der Künstlerin Cathy Fishman präsentiert. Das wahre Erlebnis der Arbeit von Ftarri besteht jedoch darin, die Musik vollständig auf CD oder als digitalen Download anzuhören, wo man die Pausen und Lücken zusammen mit den Musikern erleben und sich fernab vom Internetbrowser auf den Biorhythmus der Musiker einstimmen kann.

FEN
“1”
From 4 × 4 (2025)

This album on Ftarri’s Meenna sublabel, set aside for group recordings, documents a performance by Far East Network. Their recordings have an openness of instrumentation and ethos that manages to break new ground, even in a musical field which explicitly strives to avoid genre and convention. And with the members of the quartet spread across South East Asia, they exemplify the international connections of Ftarri’s ever growing peer to peer network. Ryu Hankil is known for using the sonic potential of everyday objects from paper to typewriter; Yan Jun uses field recordings and site-specific performances to interrogate the power of sound and silence; Otomo Yoshihide and Yuen Chee Wai use guitars as launchpads for experimentation but freely borrow sounds from elsewhere. The recording’s recurrent ticks and clicks, swooping and looming judders, and electrical ground loop hum, all evoke something between a science laboratory and a craft person’s bespoke repair shop, and resonate with the work of many sound artists incorporating everyday sounds into their art.

Li Song/Zhao Cong/Zhu Wenbo
“Three Lines (Excerpt)”
From Tangerine And The Invisible (2025)

From a brand new disc recorded at the Ftarri performance space, Tangerine And The Invisible pits two catalytic players in Beijing’s underground music scene, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo, against London based musician and programmer Li Song. “Three Lines” features Wenbo’s “transducer elastic rope feedback system”, which might be at the heart of the hovering, drawn-out high end tones which haunt this performance like a dragon fly waiting to strike.

Otomo Yoshihide
“Turntable And Harmonium Solo”
From Hummingbird And Four Flowers: Turntable And Harmonium Solo Live (2024)

2022 was the tenth anniversary of the opening of Ftarri’s store in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo. Suzuki explains how “the previous tenant used the space as a darkroom for developing photos, so the walls were originally black, and I just used them as they were (although I did repaint them when I first rented the space).” This small but flexible space was celebrated with a series of ten concerts featuring many of the veterans of Japanese improvised music, from Tetuzi Akiyama to Toshimaru Nakamura. “Each concert was a solo concert featuring a musician who has had a deep connection to Ftarri since the Improvised Music From Japan era,” says Suzuki. This performance by Yoshihide saw him pick up a harmonium in the store and play it alongside his turntable, which culminated in wild explosions of screeching and farting that rival any noise gig.

David Toop/Ecka Mordecai/Christian Kobi
”moth wings beating air incised (excerpt)”
From moth wings beating air incised (2024)

From the cacophonous to the down low, this performance from London’s Cafe Oto plays, as its title suggests, on activities around the border of inaudibility, using instruments including leaves, card and flutes. Around Mordecai’s cello and Kobi’s reed instruments, the air and atmosphere of the venue take on a meditative presence in their own right.

Taizo Hida
“The Rain Traces Its Outline (Excerpt)”
From The Rain Traces Its Outline (2024)

“It’s becoming more and more common for improvisational musicians to perform using mainly text and graphic scores,” Suzuki says. In response Ftarri launched a sublabel for classical and composed works in 2021, which has widened the remit and the palette of Ftarri significantly, just as it did in the past with UK label Another Timbre. This patient and spacious piece by Taizo Hida, performed by Masamichi Kinoshita, comprises “609 chords and single notes, each sustained for about five seconds”, and creates a similar kind of translucent shifting colour field as the work of pianist Melaine Dalibert.

Morgan Evans-Weiler & Carlo Costa
“Concept 1 (Cymbal)”
From Object, Monochord, Circle (2025)

Recorded in a basement in New York, this ingenious set of tracks explores compositions for violin and percussion which directs sounds to be played together in parallel, with short intervals in between. The use of pauses is both familiar from modern improvised music but somehow qualitatively quite different from it, punching irregular windows in the recording that disrupts any sense of intentionality or flow and forces the listener into reflection.

Tam Thi Pham/Yukiko Shiina Sakurazawa/Minami Takei/Masahide Tokunaga
“First Set”
From Ftarri Gathering (2024)

This appearance of Vietnamese born, Germany based musician Tam Thi Pham at this gig at Ftarri underlines the current international scope of Suzuki’s label. Pham plays the one-string dan bau instrument, accompanied by bass, percussion and horn, and the instrument’s wavering high pitched notes create an urgent, mercurial and unstable centre of the performance.

Lingens/Soloveitzik/Nakamura/Hatano/Yamagishi
“PLAY – 100 Playing Cards For Ensemble”
From PLAY – 100 Playing Cards For Ensemble (2025)

Perhaps nothing better represents Ftarri’s open field of possibilities than this performance of a composition by Hannes Lingens, held at Ftarri, which runs to almost 80 minutes, and is by turns quizzical, uproarious, graceful and bizarre. Lingens’s piece directs musicians to play using 100 cards with brief instructions, and the unusual instrumentation of viola, soprano sax, no-input mixing board and percussion creates a mix of intensity and incongruity that stays long in the memory.