Dominique Lentin & Takumi Fukushima

Hardly anything on this disc fails to rouse my passions, but it's also a great example of how an album can become deeply cherished for only a small segment of music that the listener turns to again and again for a certain kind of musical fix. More than that, it's a great example of an album that attains a special status because of its opening moments. The first 32 seconds of the disc is a sequence of slow, deliberate, breathtakingly resonant drum hits that instantly invoke a feeling of solemnity and ritual. My attention beomces totally fixated; I forget about anything else I might be doing and fall under a familiar spell. Dominique Lentin's percussive timbres in this passage are lucid and timbrally satisfying enough to suck me into the music in themselves, but the immediate and profound effect I experience within the first five seconds or so is equally due to my knowledge of what comes after these 32 seconds of drum hits. From dozens of listens over the past five or so years, I know that a clear, bright, plain, even, simple, slow vocal part will enter with a pacing and phrasing that perfectly complements the ongoing drum procession. Takumi Fukushima's singing transparently derives from the organization of Japanese phonology around metrically consistent syllables of one or two morae. Her pitch boundaries are a strict subset of moraic boundaries, and the beautiful slowness of her singing comes from stretching out every last mora. The simple, concise lyrics, which convey a frozen image instead of a narrative, take on a poetic elegance with this style of delivery.

Less than three minutes long, this opening track, "H.S.", ends all too soon, but my mesmerization is sustained and intensified by the next piece, "Primo", such an addictively catchy and energizing three-minute instrumental for violin and drumkit that I've occasionally played it on repeat and plucked it for various special handmade compilations. There are two basic sections in the piece. In the first, razor-edged violin riffs interlock with Lentin's straightahead driving rock rhythms, and in the second section the violin and drumkit repeat more complex figures in rhythmic opposition. The two sections alternate for the piece's duration, with transitions coming at just the right time to relieve the tension built up in each section from a theme being directly repeated a few times with rhythmic counterbalancing from simple phrasal elongations. With its insistent repetition, vigorous rhythms, and vivid melody, it feels like a synthesis of rock music and some kind of central or eastern European folk music, of the catchiness and caliber of Daniel Denis' "Bulgarian Flying Spirit Dances" from Les Eaux Troubles, and Lentin definitely belongs in the same post-RIO drumkit pantheon as Denis, not to mention Guigou Chenevier, Pippin Barnett, and Pavel Fajt, but more on that below. What really blows my mind about this piece, though, is the subtle incorporation of a third instrument, Fukushima's voice, but in a totally different way than I've heard a voice used. It's not rare to hear a string player, especially doublebassists, vocalize in melodic unison with their plucks or bows as a background accompaniment, but in the more complex second section, Fukushima uses precisely accented unpitched breath sounds—something like a vigorous panting—as an independent riff that plays off the violin and drumkit. It's not even clear that it's a vocal sound or that it's Fukushima who's making it, but that's how it sounds to me. Whatever it is, it takes my breath away. "Primo" would be a smash hit in my world even without that part though.

"H.S." and "Primo" are distinctive, one-of-a-kind pieces forming a devastating one-two punch that has made this a "go to" album for me, the kind of album that never fails to work as mood medicine, but it's really a one-two-three punch, because I always let the next track spin too. "Diamine" is a perfect construction of shifting, interwoven themes for violin and drumkit, and it's the one song I'd pick to represent this duo's prototypical sound, which unfortunately doesn't include Fukushima's precious vocals because they only appear signficantly on three pieces. For the most part, Fukushima's role is violinist. Her lines are clean, precise, melodically simple, and rhythmically jagged. Exactly the same qualities characterize Lentin's drumkit playing. They play a totally non-improvisational, meticulously rehearsed music of infectious, naive, austere, and jagged loops that revels in the simple thrills of riffs, melodies, and shifting accent patterns. The compositional approach and specific timbral orientation of the duo aligns them with certain aesthetic currents in the European post-rock avant-garde of the 1980s, especially Etron Fou Leloublan, Nimal, and Univers Zero.

Some may balk at or even ridicule the following earnest attempt at folk musicology, but I really believe there is an underlying layer of musical phenomena at play here that also accounts for the profound, mind-blowing experiences so many people, myself included, have listening to Black Sabbath and other ostensibly naive riff-based rock music. For me, even as a listener happily immersed in the so-called avant-garde, a single classic Black Sabbath song has vastly more musical value than the entire life's work of Milton Babbitt, Brian Ferneyhough, and others of their ilk who distance themselves from folk traditions in any sense. I can easily imagine a segment of the avant-garde music community who would dismiss some of this music on the grounds of naivete and simplicity, but it's this very viewpoint that I'd call naive in its reductionistic attempts to divorce musical value from empirical listening experience. The virtue of a great riff is not simplicity, but clarity, which allows it to be a means to some other aesthetic end. In its emphasis on repetition and clarity, the Lentin/Fukushima duo and related music like Volapük can be understood as a post-rock parallel to post-academic acoustic loop music (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, John Adams, Wim Mertens, Andrew Poppy, Chris Fitkin, etc).

For all the similarities with other instrumental loop music, what makes the work of Lentin and Chenevier so special is nothing other than the instrument they play, the drumkit, which is alien to the academic music tradition. To an extent, this also distinguishes some of Michael Gordon's brilliant works, like "Strange Quiet" and "Thou Shalt!/Thou Shalt Not!", which also share the off-kilter rock feeling of work by Lentin and Chenevier, though equally as much from the use of electric guitar as rock-related percussive ideas. As a specific composite of timbres, the drumkit co-evolved with rock and jazz music as a pivotal development in 20th century music (sadly dishonored by the objectionably standardized metonym "drums"), and even when it's used in unrelated idioms, the specific rhythms and coloration characteristic of a drumkit forge a strong link to rock and/or jazz music. Like the Bittová/Fajt duo, the Lentin/Fukushima duo recontextualize the musical feeling of certain European folk musics by using a drumkit, in which sense their work is analogous to klezmer and polka. Disanalogously, however, it sprouts from an avant-garde rock context and I think of both of these incredible duos as post-Beefheart, post-Glass acoustic Euro private folk music. "Private" reflects the individualistic nature of this music, echoing Iva Bittová's description of her work as "my own personal folk music".

Recordings of violin/percussion duos are simply quite rare in the first place as far as I know (message to musicians: please make more!), so it's worth dwelling on the simple fact of the timbres involved. I could talk till I'm blue in the face about all these jagged and angular rhythms and so on, but a huge part of my love affair with this disc is based on nothing other than sheer timbral preference for drumkit and string instruments. I tried to make this same point in my recent review of the Nakatani/Chen Duo disc Limn. I just really love these sounds! In fact, every violin/percussion duo album I can even casually think of off the top of my head is a massive favorite of mine (note I'm referring to violins in the general sense of bowed string instruments in the same family just like we refer to saxophones, etc). Besides the disc at hand, the two Bittová/Fajt albums (which I can't praise highly enough), and Limn, there is the delicious, incredible These Are Our Shoes by Peggy Lee and Dylan van der Schyff (and their trio with John Butcher is also mind-blowing!), and the groundbreaking Light Trigger by Mat Maneri and Randy Peterson (to give some idea of how I feel about this, of all the albums I've heard in my life, there are only two I'd rank higher than Light Trigger). All these albums are so different in style, but I think the simple power of timbral attraction is overlooked as a factor in people's musical experience because I'm just head over heels in love with these five albums I've mentioned; I could play each one a few times a week and never tire of them. Because I'm simply trying to report my experiences as a listener, I want to really emphasize this point. The matter of timbre is typically just taken for granted when we discuss common instruments, but it's incredibly non-trivial.

Recordings by either Dominique Lentin or Takumi Fukushima, who haven't worked together in any other publicly documented projects that I'm aware of, are sparse and difficult to come across. Likewise for information about either of them. As far as I know, there are very few English-language reviews of this duo album, and unfortunately I have virtually no biographical information to offer as context in this review, but there are some basic pertinent facts to mention. Fukushima has become a familiar name in avant-prog circles through her work with Volapük on their last two albums, Polyglot on Cuneiform and Where is Tamashii? on Orkhestra International. A trio of bass clarinettest Michel Mandel (who has also played other clarinets and taragot in the group), cellist Guillaume Saurel, and the legendary, inimitable drumkitter Guigou Chenevier, Volapük had already established a reputation as one of the most creative and astounding post-RIO units ever heard, even rivalling Chenevier's seminal, unspeakably brilliant Etron Fou Leloublan, with two studio albums on Cuneiform (Le Feu du Tigre and Slang) and a live album on Retort Media (Pükapök), but the addition of Fukushima's violin and voice (as a guest on Polyglot and a full member on Tamashii) elevated the ensemble into more personal and emotional realms. There are such pervasive similarities between this duo album and Volapük (even the pre-Fukushima albums), that I wouldn't hesitate to call it absolutely essential for any serious Volapük fan.

Of course, Dominique Lentin and Guigou Chenevier are different drumkitters, but the similarities are far more interesting to me as a devoted admirer of Chenevier—he'd easily make any drumkit top ten I'd construct. Lentin and Chenevier have an incredibly precise, even clinical, approach to the drumkit, imbuing off-kilter grooves with dizzying polyrhythms and polymeters.The two Frenchmen have clearly been intertwined for more than two decades and I'm guessing Chenevier's work in Etron Fou was a formative influence on Lentin, but I don't have any actual facts to support this and apparently Lentin was active contemporaneously with Etron. Lentin was the drumkitter in one of Etron Fou bass guitar genius Ferdinand Richard's most successful and prominent post-Etron projects, the guitar-oriented Les Philosophes, who took the Etron and Frith influences in a slightly more New Wavey and poppy direction, but still retained the jagged, abrupt rhythmicality that makes all this music so exciting for me. The only other work I've heard by Lentin is 1996's Bousillator by Zou, a quite good, but not great or essential, record in a familiar 80s Downtown avant-jazz/rock/funk style, more or less a second-rate example of the style because of a tendency towards limpidity and cliches, but with a few intense and thrilling moments that justify an investigation by connoisseurs of the genre.

As a member of Haco's After Dinner for its 1989 European tour—she also did session work on four tracks from Paradise of Replica— Takumi Fukushima was presumably a Japanese musician who came into contact with the avant-rock underground in Europe and went on to participate in a various projects that I sadly know little about, besides Volapük and this duo album. One of her primary projects has been Rale, a group led by Vladimír Václavek of the Czech Republic that has released three albums. I dearly hope to hear all these albums someday, but so far I've only acquired their 1994 self-titled debut, a really charming and emotionally engaging work of mellow, moody avant-folk dominated by acoustic guitar and Václavek's bassy, intimate vocals. Václavek's vocals are quite nice for what they are, but I sure wish they'd given way to Fukushima's precious singing for more than just one track, "Dare-mo Inakatta", but this track is a total gem of sprightly, sparse, catchy avant-pop driven by Fukushima's evenly metered, clear singing and her intoxicating repeating pizzicato melody on violin. It's the only track on the Rale album I actually listen to with any frequency. A very similar catchy pizzicato figure is used in "Has Been" on the Lentin/Fukushima album, but instead of being a quirky pop treasure with Fukushima singing, the pizzicato motif alternates with two overdubbed Glassian looping violin parts, and instead of contributing any percussion Lentin hums a bit and then recites a poem in French. It's a beautiful piece and a good example of the aesthetically conservative, yet diverse and creative nature of the album. As much as any other track, it also represents the pervasive mood of somber introspection.

Václavek has collaborated with Iva Bittová on several occasions and it's certainly obvious Fukushima has taken some inspiration from this wonderwoman of the Czech avant-garde, although it seems strictly limited to her violin playing and compositional approach because their vocal styles are nearly opposite. With its gradual whirling-dervish increase in intensity and shifts in tempo as drums and violin wrap around each other, "Secondo" is the Lentin/Fukushima track that comes closest to the legendary, timeless work of Bittová's duo with Pavel Fajt, but Lentin and Fukushima never come anywhere close to the ecstatic frenzy that the Czech duo could whip themselves into. Nor has anyone else! Even those who aren't familiar with their incendiary 1987 self-titled album or the 1987 live recordings of similar material on Svatba—two totally essential highlights of 20th century music for my tastes—will understand what I'm talking about when they recall the live footage of the duo captured on Step Across the Border. To create music for violin and drumkit that's even roughly similar to such miraculous music is enough of an achievement to make the Lentin/Fukushima disc a priceless treasure. In terms of precision, virtuosity, and a feeling of odd-metered tribal groove, there is indeed a great similarity between Lentin and Fajt's drumkit work, but Lentin rarely delivers the kind of spiralling climaxes that Fajt (and Lê Quan Ninh I might add) is known for.

Among the 15 tracks here, only 5 ("Primo", "Diamine", "Terzo", "Secondo", "Parapapa") could be classified as the duo's core acoustic violin/drumkit music based on jagged grooves and post-prog thematic juxtapositions. That leaves 10 tracks of fascinating divergences! It is truly a rich album that offers more than I usually digest in one listening session. As mentioned above, Fukushima's incredible and underutilized (here and in her other projects) singing appears alone with drums on "H.S.". A roughly similar vocal performance with Japanese lyrics is offered in "Lakc", but here it elevates an already fantastic composition for violin and drumkit, making it one of my four favorite tracks alongside the three leadoff tracks I discussed in the beginning of the review. The only other piece with Fukushima singing is "Ceremony", a truly anomalous track that finds her singing non-linguistically in a style that recalls Scandinavian or East European folk music, in sections that are radically juxtaposed with fierce, aggressive bursts of avant-prog using a sampler to add rhythmic punchiness akin to Univers Zero's Heatwave (and also Rhythmix and Implosion for that matter).

Lentin's sampler plays a prominent role in four other pieces, always augmenting the rich acoustic timbres of his drumkit and Fukushima's violin instead of displacing them. The electronically-assisted Univers Zero feeling comes through again in "Alfred" and "Tagalo"; Lentin seems to be sampling a digital synth. "Tagalo" is noteworthy for its sinister looping lope and middle passage with Fukushima delving into harsh, scribbling violin playing in total contrast to her usual measured, careful, conventional style. In fact, there's only one other brief passage on the disc where she explores the raw side of bowed strings, and it's in another sampler-based piece, the uncharacteristically rambunctious and playful "Transe de Guingois", which finds Lentin's drumkit and sampled bassy synth sounds in an outright hoedown that fondly reminds me of the wackier upbeat sections on the 1991 avant-prog/loop-rock/post-Downtown mega-classic Hybrid Beat from Austria's Kombinat M, whose young drumkit whiz, Lukas Ligeti, is another great example of someone with a similar aesthetic of off-kilter, precise, complex, loopy grooves like Lentin, Chenevier, Denis, Barnett, and Fajt mentioned above.

Closing out the disc, "Opera Udu" is an equally fascinating and surprising departure resulting from Lentin's sampler. Alongside some typically great violin and drumkit riffing is some very pastoral violin and drumkit accompaniment to Japanese spoken word by Fukushima and a dreamy, fragmented sampler-generated looping texture of female singing somewhat like Nobukazu Takemura's work.

More often than not, when I just want a quick fix I play the first three tracks of the disc, but as I've outlined above, the album is a treasure chest of unique music and I love every single track. I often cut the session short before the fourth track, "Feu Follet", because it doesn't function like a pop/folk song in the way most of the other tracks do; it requires a more patient mode of listening. It's a special experience that doesn't suit every listening occasion. The longest track at six minutes, Fukushima's violin appears alone for the first two minutes repeating a very slow and simple phrase before Lentin enters with some cymbals and drums in a contrastive and uncharacteristically loose, clustered style. As Fukushima unwaveringly continues with her dry, crawling violin loop, Lentin then switches to some kind of sustained background tone sounding like a gong or perhaps something sampled. There's virtually no thematic variation in Fukushima's violin fragment for the entire six minutes, drawing attention to subtle and beautiful variations in bowing pressure and unintentional variations in phrasing. For the last 90 seconds or so, Fukushima also introduces a faint background layer of vocal tones that combines with Lentin's subtle gongish layer to give just enough development and resolution to the piece.

This disc has been a special obscure treasure I've returned to regularly since buying it on a lark some years ago and I'm long overdue to pay tribute to it. Sadly I've never found anyone else express enthusiasm for it anywhere, either in-person or online. It strikes me as a criminally overlooked masterpiece that a lot of other people would fall in love with and I can only hope that these two unique musicians have similar treasures in the works.

~Michael Anton Parker

Released by SMI in 1999 and available from Wayside Music and Orkhestra International.