Intriguing, Edgy Cross-Genre Compositions From Dai Fujikura

One of the most eclectic and consistently gripping new instrumental albums of recent months is composer Dai Fujikura’s surreallistically titled Turtle Totem, streaming at Bandcamp. The image was inspired by the historic Nagara no ZaZa garden in Japan, where a bridge over a pond supposedly allows visitors to visit the afterlife and then return. All around, there are stone figures of turtles, some piggybacking on others who carry them to the next world (and presumably back as well).

The material here is a mix of orchestral pieces, unorthodox solo works and an opening number that’s essentially jazz. Will all this transport you like a turtle? With a little imagination, yes. As diverse as the sounds are here, Fujikura’s passion for strange tonalities and translucent tunes is contagious.

That first number, Three, is a triptych, which Australian trio Ensemble Three (trumpeter Joel Brennan, trombonist Don Immel and guitarist Ken Murray) tackle expressively in a live performance. The first part is lusciously Lynchian: Murray’s grim chords, awash in reverb, pulse in and out as the horns filter uneasily through the mix. The second part has the horns doing faster wah-wah than the guitar; the third part begins as muted psychedelic funk and ends with a long, acidic guitar solo that brings to mind Gordon Grdina. The composer calls this the happiest piece of music he’s ever written.

The performance of Fujikura’s Horn Concerto No. 2 by Ensemble Nomad with soloist Nobuaki Fukukawa was also recorded live in concert. Fujikura found other horn concertos rather strident, so he and Fukukawa experimented with special mutes for unexpected wah-wah and whale-song effects. And the ensemble mimic them as well, throughout calm, atmospheric passages, chattering acidity, shivery suspense and artful echo riffage for playfully astringent variations on a wobbly sound.

Tamami Tono plays Obi, for sho and electronics. In the liner notes, Fujikura boasts that this is the fastest that the Japanese reed instrument can be played. As he discovered, the answer is midtempo: Tono performs this trippy, immersively meditative piece in her natural upper register, echoed in the lows by what’s essentially a pitch pedal.

Ensemble Nomad bassist Yoji Sato plays another solo work, Scarlet Ibis, in an alternate tuning, evincing natural harmonics and overtones with a mix of fierce plucks and bowed echo phrases (and a ton of reverb) .Clarinetist Makoto Yoshida plays the album’s title track, an unexpectedly brisk, circling solo work utilizing plenty of low register and gritty extended technique.

The album ends with a third concert recording, Antoni Wit leading the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra in Fujikura’s Umi for Orchestra, an oceanic new tone poem based on an excerpt from his opera Solaris. Opening with nebulously atonal vastness, the ensemble shift between waves shiveringly reaching onto the shore, bracing swells that suddenly subside, and a twinkling nightscape anchored by bassoon and cellos. It’s a calmer Hebrides Overture for a new idiom in a new century