Browse by Artist: EXIAS-J

Artist:	EXIAS-J
Title:	2002.11.17 Live at Aire-Gin, Yokohama
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 133CD

"Formed around the nucleus of full-on guitarist and theorist Hideaki Kondo in 1999, Exias-J (shorthand for Experimental Improvisers Association of Japan) have succeeding in building up their own self-contained scene over the past three years. Working as a kind of collective, with members from a wide variety of musical backgrounds (classical, jazz, experimental film, acoustic design, philosophy) showing up on different electric and acoustic projects, their Bishop Records imprint has to date released nine CDs worth of impressively focussed (and on occasion, unashamedly noisy) free improvisation. The collective have taken it upon themselves to 'deconstruct and reconstruct Japanese music', freeing it both from the cult of imitation of Western avant-garde patterns and the idea that Japanese music must somehow be ethereal and beautiful. What this means in practice is that their love of free jazz, free improv, minimalism, musique concrete, electronic music et al gets sucked into an industrial-strength blender, amped up to eleven, and splattered all over the rear wall. For this, their first release on PSF, the collective call up their electric brigade and put in a set of performances whose volume+density+full-on flail equation approaches pretty damn close to Takayanagi New Direction-esque levels of pleasure. Even when they turn it down for explorations of AMM-space, there's a purely physical heft to their music that is as enticing as any to have emerged in the past decade."

Artist:	EXIAS-J
Title:	Balance of Chaos
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PSF 154CD

"Thrilling document of seriously wired Japanese improv collective, raising electric ghosts and phantom sonorities live in New York. Exias-J (short for Experimental Improviser's Association of Japan) have been around since 2000, and this is their second release on PSF. The group express a dedication to bringing the sounds of classic Euro free improv into collision with free jazz, minimalism, electronic music, scalp-raising rock improv and a dozen other musical discourses. Balance of Chaos captures the collective, in a number of shifting trio and quintet permutations, live on their first tour of the US in the autumn of 2003. The stated aims of the collective's 'electric conception' is to disrupt traditional instrumental hierarchies through the application of electro-acoustics. However, that pat explanation gives little sense of the kinetic physicality, knife-edge tensions, and complex structural density embodied in these thrilling performances (though the whooping and hollering audiences were clearly feeling it). If you have any bottomless holes in your musical history that need filling, these boys and their diachronic spades will more than do the job." -- Alan Cummings.

Artist:	EXIAS-J
Title:	Live Document 2003-2005
Label:	PSF (JAPAN)
Format:	DVD
Price:	$24.00
Catalog #:	PSFDV 003

"'Free improvisation may have provided the original touch-paper for Exias-J's inception as a group, but by the time of the performances documented on this DVD we had gradually begun to move beyond it as a category. For instance, we began to incorporate deliberate internal structures in the form of compositional techniques such as minimalism, twelve-tone or atonalism, and we started to interrogate musical forms such as the sonata or ostinato. Or else in performance, we adopted approaches such as reliance upon a restricted number of modes, variations on a particular theme, extended instrumental technique, and forms of expression based on (non-harmonically structured) sound images themselves. In order to construct these phenomenological relationships, multiple techniques have been employed here, however, they appear to be completely subordinated to receptive function of the viewer and the creative function of the musicians. I believe that this is something of which we can be justifiably proud. Since music relies upon these phenomenological relationships as its medium, I never like to make light of the methods by which modes and phenomena can be generalized, however, I have no desire to turn a method into a goal.' --Kondo Hideaki. Third release on PSF by Exias-J (Experimental Improvisor's Association of Japan), Japan's most conceptually-determined improvising collective and their first DVD. Containing three performances from Tokyo and New York, this is a challenging clash of methodologies and sonorities, hugely exciting in its electric power and formal heft. 142 minutes, region free, NTSC format, 4:3."

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