Taku Sugimoto Guitar Quartet (Bottrop-Boy)

For me, the most interesting performance from last year’s Erstquake festival (or at least, the most interesting performance during the two nights I attended), was also among the most maligned in many post-fest write-ups of the event. If I could summarize the criticism of the meeting between Keith Rowe and Julien Ottavi, it would be that Rowe and Ottavi fiddled around with their radios for awhile, predictably fishing up reports of the war in Iraq and the devastation in the Gulf Coast before surrendering the performance when Ottavi snagged a string quartet from the airwaves and the duo walked off stage, the quartet still playing on Julien’s radio.

All this is more or less accurate, but for me what made the performance was what happened next. The lights came on, and for a few moments the audience seemed unsure of what to do. When does the performance end? The performers had taken their seats among the audience, and for just a few moments, sat as they did, hunched over, quietly listening to the radio signal. Then, it began to unravel. A few people started clapping, and soon the whole room was applauding. Since this was the last performance of the evening, people began to stir about the room, chatting with each other and generally packing up their things to head home. I remained seated, however, still bending my ear toward Ottavi’s radio, which was still playing the music from the string quartet. Gradually, the people moving about the room disrupted the radio signal, and the quartet performance became submerged in static. A few minutes later, the radio was turned off. Walking back to the hotel that night, it occurred to me that the audience, rather than the musicians, had ended the performance. By walking off the stage while the radio was still playing, Rowe and Ottavi had effectively handed the car keys over to the audience, which became a third participant, deciding when to officially end the proceedings. Theoretically, the performance could have continued indefinitely, with a room full of people quietly listening to the radio still playing in the center of the small stage.

Which circuitously brings me to this recording, Taku Sugimoto Guitar Quartet, released on the German label Bottrop-Boy in 2003. For those familiar with Sugimoto’s work over the past few years, there is really nothing surprising about this music. Like its neighbors in the Sugimoto discography, TSGQ explores the infinite space between 1 and 0, placing smaller and smaller fractions of music within longer and longer periods of inactivity. A guitar note is played, it hangs in the air for a moment, then dies away. A few minutes pass. Another note is played. More time passes. Another note. And so forth, for 60 minutes or so.

Given this somewhat repetitious minimalism, what has distinguished each Sugimoto recording is not what happens when Sugimoto (or in the case of TSGQ, the other three musicians accompanying him) plays, but what happens when he doesn’t play. There is the rainstorm from Live in Australia, the distant mechanical hum of passing cars in appel, and in this recording, digital silence cloaking the slightest movements of bodies, inhaling and exhaling, shifting in their chairs. In each of these live performances, the degree of unintended ambient noise that we hear in the recording is determined not just by Sugimoto’s reticence, but also by the audience’s willingness to match it. After all, when Sugimoto doesn’t play his guitar, why should the audience remain quiet? Because they are gripped by the tension building between each note? Because they are bored out of their minds? Regardless of their reasons, the audience has become Sugimoto’s most important collaborator, entering and shaping each performance in utterly unique ways. In this sense, Sugimoto’s work could be rightly viewed—perhaps paradoxically—as among the most democratic and participatory in improvised music today. And like the Rowe/Ottavi performance at Erstquake, in many cases the audience may be collaborating in the performance without even realizing it, unaware that the line between performer and listener is slowly dissolving, the musician’s restraint a reflection not just of an evolving set of aesthetic principles, but also a mirror aimed at the small crowd of devotees who have assembled around them, hanging on their every gesture.

David Jones