Natsuki Tamura and Satoko Fujii like to keep you on your toes. The last two discs I heard from them, for instance, couldn’t have been more different: Tamura’s earshredding Hada Hada and Fujii’s jazz trio session Illusion Suite. In the Tank features two guitarists, Elliott Sharp and Takayuki Kato, so I was anticipating another pitched noisefest along the lines of Hada Hada, but the album turns out instead to be patient, clutter-free improv, mostly on the quieter end of things. The continuous 68-minute performance is divided up into four tracks on the CD, though the whole thing is actually a mosaic of many smaller episodes, each with a different texture and different personnel; in fact it’s rare that all four musicians play at once. In the absence of a drummer, everyone seems to take turns as a timekeeper; Fujii in particular often sets each episode’s pace and mood with slow cyclings of spare, bone-china patterns. Think AMM meets blues guitar meets 1970s Miles Davis and you get some idea of the disc’s flavour: a slow-moving panorama for the ears, where sounds are systematically added, repeated, refined, and replaced in turn. The closing sequence, “Crowing Crab,” is especially strong: Tamura and Sharp (on soprano sax) square off over a clackety-clack groove; this is followed by an extended passage of hovering-spacecraft weirdness; and then Tamura pulls an eggshell-delicate ballad out of his trumpet to bring the whole performance to a gentle close.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, January 2006