1 Untitled 32:44
2 Untitled 26:47
Tetuzi Akiyama is one of those musicians who have the constant capacity to surprise; he just keeps changing so that it is impossible to anticipate what he will do next. His appearance in 2003 on the minimalist Foldings with Mark Wastell, not playing guitar but turntable and air duster, was followed by the hard rock vibe of Don’t Forget To Boogie (not an ironic title) and Route 13 to the Gates of Hell, after which came the acoustic dissonance of last year’s Pre-Existence. Now comes Striking Another Match, as different from all of those as they are from each other.
On it, Akiyama is recorded live, alone with his steel strung acoustic guitar, mainly picking the blues. The sound recording is not great; often of bootleg quality, it was “taken directly from analogue cassette”. The lower register of the guitar sometimes has that dead wooden thud that is characteristic of a lo-fi recording and there is also frequent crackle and hiss. But somehow this seems entirely appropriate for the after-hours feel of the music. Even though occasional sporadic applause indicates that there was an audience present, this sounds like a musician off-duty, just trying things out and playing around to amuse no one else but himself; it feels as if we are eavesdropping.
The recording consists of two long tracks totalling an hour of playing time, but within each long track there is not unbroken continuity; there are countless stops, starts, silences, periods of tuning up and chat to the audience as well as several different pieces. For much of the time, we are in territory reminiscent of John Fahey, with the ringing tones of the steel strings prevalent. However, Akiyama never displays the fluidity, dexterity, or invention of Fahey at his best. This sounds like work in progress rather than the finished article. That is certainly true of a vocal interlude midway through the first track; after a lengthy introduction in Japanese, Akiyama delivers up a blues song that is pared back to bare essentials, with each verse consisting of one repeated line. (So, verse one consists of “Driving down south” repeated three times, and so on.) But for all its sparseness, the song has a mantra-like charm all of its own. Indeed, that is the word that best conveys this album’s appeal—“charm”.
There are periods here where not much of note happens, but even when Akiyama is laying down a simple series of very spare chords, the results are always listenable. Midway through track two, there is a fascinating piece where Akiyama experiments with bending notes by detuning and retuning the strings, followed immediately by some fine bottleneck. Yes, Akiyama is not just full of surprises between albums; he can also surprise from one minute to the next.
One Final Note
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