n a genre where artists are distinguished by their particular instrumental quirk, Günter Müller and Otomo Yoshihide draw well-deserved renown for their uncanny, ego-squelching adaptability. Müller’s chameleonic percussion and electronics bubble and pulse beneath his collaborators or seep imperceptibly into the sonic bedrock, and his slow, looming gestures subtly dictate musical pacing with near-imperceptible rhythm. His is persuasion by gravity and glacial pressure, coalescing his partners’ gestures into aggregates like paint pooled by rippling a coarse canvas. Yoshihide pursues a more outwardly assertive brand of flexibility, preferring to meet his collaborators halfway with nimble multi-instrumentalism and a dizzying range of influence. His turntable and guitar inventions run the gamut from brittle and whisper-thin scratch to signal-spiking noise – infinitely pliable, yet retaining a singular musicality in all their permutations.


Though its track titles constitute a log of their larger-ensemble collaborations, Time Travel documents the first of two appearances by Yoshihide and Müller as a duo. Their latter encounter at Erstwhile’s AMPLIFY festival was, by all accounts, a captivating display of the duo’s more dramatic and aggressive dynamic tendencies, culminating in a turntable-thrashing climax steered by Müller’s tidal percussive outpourings. As would befit a pairing of such noted adaptability, their earlier studio offerings pursue an entirely subtler course that trades volatility and narrative tension for patient, detail-heavy soundscaping churned by gradual evolution. True to its titular suggestion, it’s music that traffics in a temporal elasticity and the suspension of sound between acceleration and deceleration, with Müller and Yoshihide generating teeming clouds of activity that buzz and stall like a slowly thawing gas. Deliberate and sensuous, Time Travel commands the attention with subliminal grace, less a breaking down of doors than the pouring rich surges of silt into some of the mind’s less-explored crevices.


Much of the music is marked by a delicate and woozy state of anonymity, particularly in those moments where Yoshihide’s grainy turntable whisking bleeds through Müller’s scraping minidisc loops. “Lisboa 98” mingles these granular textures to subtle and stirring effect, snaking a thread of scratch and hum through its shifting morass of modulated drumhead feedback and icy whistling. Streams of loose static and amorphous thumps filter into growling bass drones and fizzling streaks or dissolve into wisps of smoke atop Müller’s hints at a wobbly pulse. Even when shying from his percussive devices, Müller works up a masterful array of rhythmic illusions from lopsided loops of treated samples, and Yoshihide’s sympathetic responses imbue their more electronic exchanges with burbling interior motion. “Nancy 01” finds Müller and Yoshihide infusing their sputters with a more explicit rhythmic foundation spun from washes of delay-fussed cymbals and stylus creaking, while layer upon layer of sound compress into a crackling mass of drone and microscopic commotion. The blurring of distinct identities into a common sound-form opens up a wide range of associative possibility for the players and listener alike, and the music unfolds in lulling organic tumbles that conjure imagined realms of metallic microbes and blown dust.


A number of tracks on Time Travel feature Yoshihide splitting his duties between emptied turntables and electric guitar, from which he rolls out rich chimed strokes and unearthly shivers above Müller’s intricate electronic foundations. While Yoshihide’s turns at the guitar render the player’s identities more distinct, they never venture into episodes of soloistic dominance. Tracks such as the opening “Matsushima 89” and “Basel 95” exemplify both Yoshihide’s attentive ear and his emphasis on the careful placement of sound above technical fireworks – he strings single-note islands into muted mallet strokes or hangs them in feedback blossoms like a more muscular Taku Sugimoto. “Victoriaville 01” opens with broken bell flourishes snapped from prepared guitar before sliding beneath a gravel-slide of scratching electronics, and “Sydney 02” observes Yoshihide bowing his guitar to excite shimmering harmonics while Müller echoes with long peals of rubbed metal and glistening feedback. Yoshihide removes the guitar from its traditional position as instrumental centerpiece and recasts it as a tonal texture generator – one texture among the many – and his willingness to mold it to Müller’s rippling landscapes yields results as mesmeric as their more electronics sublimations.


From its opening sizzles to the undulating feedback coda “Tokyo 02,” Time Travel stands as a stellar example of electroacoustic improv’s subtler, impressionistic strands without softening its sharp edges. Yoshihide and Müller shape their music with masterful craftsmanship and a coupling of patience and well-metered restlessness; together, they intertwine countless strata of rich drones and worn-stone clatter into a warm, evocative as supple and disorienting as the warped time-zone boundaries of its Friedrike Paetzold cover. A playground for the ears and imagination, Time Travel ranks among the best discs in Yoshihide and Müller’s respective catalogs, and like its creators, it’s a music both captivating and unselfish – music that lures the attention rather than clamoring for it, vacillating between clarity and blurriness with all the variability of distant or imagined memories.