Takumi Seino & Motohiko Ichino: Frozen Dust

May 10, 2024

Frozen Dust is a live recording that captures guitarists Takumi Seino and Motohiko Ichino playing improvised jazz during their first set of the night at Kanmachi 63 in Yokohama. The two-track album is full of abstract improvisation throughout its forty-six minutes. The music is experimental to a degree, but close listening reveals musical themes within the subtle compositional frameworks and free improvisation.

This first meeting of the pair demonstrates not only their guitar playing but also their liberal use of electric effects, adding modulated buzzes, textures, echoes, and filters to their mellow yet edgy musical tones. These guitar effects add a lot of personality to the music, setting up atmospheres that evolve from playful and curious to dark and intimidating.

#1 “Frozen Dust”:

The first track is relatively long at about thirty-seven minutes, and while it seems to be spontaneously improvised, there are some phase changes as the two players create, move through, and respond to the music.

“Frozen Dust” can be divided into three subtly distinct sections, not rigidly set but impressionistically discernable. There are even subparts within these three sections as flights of fancy, temporary ideas, and shifts of focus morph and adjust in the dialogue of the pair.

The first roughly ten-minute section is like an introduction phase. It is an initial conversation between two entities who offer musical ideas back and forth and begin to play with each other, intertwining and sounding each other out. It’s as if they are establishing contact and making judgments on whether the encounter will be friendly or hostile, and how to move forward from there. In this phase, the mood is playful and jumpy and begins to settle into a story.

The next ten minutes or so incorporate more guitar effects. Echoes and reverse echoes, volume swells, delays, loops, modulation, and other sonic effects begin to create a spookier part of the journey. The music at times dips into a science fiction ambience as the warm guitar tones interact with retro-futuristic sounds. The mood is chaotic and suspenseful as the organic sounds battle with the digital, with the digital forces extending toward the horizon.

The third phase starts at about twenty-two minutes. A single low note is struck and repeats like a bell, over which five dark chords slowly descend and establish a motif that is somber and ominous. The guitar effects here are less up-front but work excellently to produce textured guitar tones that warble with the feel of tarnished antiques and ghosts. The result is like listening to slightly warped vinyl that is vintage and almost worn out, but all the more precious for that.

It is in this third, fourteen-minute section that the two players seem to settle into more conventional roles of rhythm player and improvising soloist. The slowly repeating pedal tone anchors each player to a tonic foundation as they freely yet cooperatively explore the shadowy territory.

Still, even here, their haunting improvisations are combined with music that is full of unrelentingly tense drone notes, anguished guitar wails and moans fading in and out, and resurfacing of the electronic beeps, swells, and modulation from the pair’s tempered use of effects.

#2 “Water’s Edge”:

Compared to the first track, #2 “Water’s Edge” is short and sweet at about nine minutes and continues in the mode of free-ish jazz rooted in cooperation with one guitar’s comping and one improvising. This song also seems to have a written-out final chord-and-melody statement, played freely, whose skeletal structure is filled out with the aural blooms and arcs that the composition allows for.

Finally here, at the end of the album, the music ends and the audience begins clapping, the musicians are introduced, and the listener is reminded of the captivating live creation that this recording captures.

From the promotional material:

Like ice pieces flying in the air, the sounds that are not allowed to stay.
An improvisational tapestry swaying between stillness and motion, spun by two guitarists with their own worldview.
Unedited full direct recording of the first set of the first duo live at Yokohama Kanmachii 63.

As a final, perhaps trivial, note, there is a brief out-of-place moment near the end of “Frozen Dust” when somebody’s sneeze is audibly captured on the recording, forever embedded in the music for one second. This happy accident brings into focus the in-the-moment musical creation, as well as the intimate music venue where musicians and listeners gather closely to create and appreciate… not to mention adding a humorous momentary dimension to the title of the song itself.