Benjamin Herman – The Tokyo Sessions (Vinyl)

Benjamin Herman is always looking for different approaches to make records, and with his new trio – bassist Thomas Pol, drummer/producer Jimmi Jo Hueting and himself – he has established a great synergy. To immerse themselves into Tokyo’s hyper-eclectic musical underbelly was too enticing a prospect to ignore. Minds were ceaselessly and consistently blown in districts like Shimokitazawa and Koenji where underground scenes in the city continue to flourish. Noise artists, freejazz anarchists, math punk outfits… each murky basement a Pandora’s Box of surprising genre-shattering sounds.
Enraptured and infected, Herman, Hueting and Pol found a box of their own to explore their own out-of-the-box mentality to music. Under the deft hands of analog recording sage Akihito Yoshikawa at his Studio Dede – the trio bundled their collective chops to forge fresh sounds through time-honored means. Joining them are some of the most esteemed names in Japanese music, namely venerated composer/jazz musician Otomo Yoshihide and tenor sax maverick Tomoaki Baba – who stole thunder on the soundtrack of Tachikawa Yuzuru’s Blue Giant (2023).
Trumpet plauer Shinpei Ruike returned to perform (after playing on Herman’s album Nostalgia Blitz), as well as two accomplished practitioners of traditional Japanese woodwinds: Akihito Obama on shakuhachi and Ko Ishiwaka on sho. Having such riches in energy and eclecticism bore almost too much fruit. Through live instrumentation, sampling and recording – Herman and his hermanos enter a collective space of feeling, where styles like freejazz, noise and new wave coalesce within the same express lane. It became an album where friendships translate into a tapestry of distinct sounds and sensibilities, bundled together in a chaotic, high rolling adventure.