his trio of musicians will be familiar to anyone who’s had a finger on the pulse of modern improv lately, and the idea of all three of them together on one disc—something that, quite surprisingly, has never happened before—will certainly get you salivating at the possibilities. Good Morning Good Night truly lives up to those lofty expectations. A double-disc set, this album is a daunting, challenging, but ultimately very rewarding recording. One whose pleasures are found in miniscule amounts of sonic information: the insectile twitter of Nakamura and Sachiko M, and the grittier but equally minimal contributions of Yoshihide.

The first disc starts with “Good Morning,” a half-hour piece that lays the groundwork for the rest of the album. In many ways, this is an extension of the Nakamura/Sachiko collaboration do, released on Erstwhile almost three years ago. The music here is much more sparse and minimal; not as harsh as do’s unrelenting sine wave assaults sometimes were, but drifting and gentle, often so quiet as to verge on inaudibility. Long stretches are taken up by wavering, twitching high-pitched tones from Sachiko’s “empty” sampler (one in which all samples aside from the sine-wave test tone are removed), ear-twisting sounds that seem to flutter and change with each minimal shift in the listener’s position. Nakamura buttresses these deceptively simple sounds with the crackle and buzz of feedback loops from his no-input mixing board, and Yoshihide (whose contributions are often the most subtle and hardest to spot) adds glitchy spurts of noise and scrapes on his bare turntables.

The second piece on this disc is comparatively brief at eight minutes, and it consequently takes a much more direct route than the sprawling, slow-moving “Good Morning.” It uses fast spurts of static and compact beeps and pops to present a short and accessible window into the otherwise forbidding soundscapes contained on these two discs. In the space of this brief interlude, it’s as though the long static stretches of the previous track have been folded up and aerated, the sound filled out—relatively, of course, since it’s still stark and pristine—and the listener given a chance to absorb what’s happening in a more digestible format.

But despite this short window of openness, mirroring the windows that comprise the four-paneled artwork, this album’s true beauty and power doesn’t become clear until the hour-long second disc. The two tracks here roughly divide the disc in half, but they might as well both have been part of the same surreally gorgeous piece. What’s notable on this disc is the way the album’s overarching concept becomes apparent in the music. Erstwhile designer Friederike Paetzold based her minimalist design on artist James Turrell’s Unseen Blue, a wooden building with a rectangular hole in the roof with a view on the sky. That piece, with its emphasis on the passage of time and the way light changes mood and appearance, is a perfect complement to this album’s ethereal sense of time.

“Good Evening,” the first piece, seems to move with total independence from time. A high-register sine tone from Sachiko hangs over everything, subtle enough that if it weren’t for the overall sparseness of the piece, it would likely go unnoticed. Under this constant overhang, Nakamura and Yoshihide cluster bits of feedback, static, and crackling noise, grainy counterpoints to the purifying simplicity of Sachiko’s glistening tones. Its 25 minutes stretch out into a seeming eternity, but without ever seeming to lag. In fact, it doesn’t so much seem like a CD is playing at all. Instead, it’s as though the very molecules in the room are vibrating with sound, the sound of the universe rearranging itself and reverberating around the space. This is some of the most powerful, beautiful music that any of these musicians have yet recorded.

The final piece, “Good Night,” is equally impressive. It opens with crackles, pops, and motor whirs over Sachiko’s wavery sine waves, bringing to mind bubbles rising up to the surface of an otherwise still lake. It’s a warm, comfortable sound, seeping into the listener’s pores and enfolding every part of the body, like a sensual bath in sound. How these musicians could elicit such a rich, enveloping sound from their minimal means is a true puzzle, and one that the actual music thwarts at every turn. Throughout the 37 minutes of this piece, the music again flows in such a way that it seems to both fly by without even being noticed, and to stretch on into the unattainable distance. Sachiko’s sine waves are even more spatial on this track than elsewhere, seeming to actively move out into the 3D environment, lingering in corners of the room and revolving around the listener’s head like tiny unseen insects—it’s a disorienting sensation.

Good Morning Good Night is a phenomenal new recording, perhaps the ultimate statement from the Japanese minimal improvisation scene known as onkyo. What’s exceptional about this album is its very challenging nature: it’s obviously distant and inaccessible in some ways, but it’d also be impossible to call it cold or uniniviting. There’s something actually—paradoxically—warm and emotional in these abstract sounds, something that touches deep nerves and primal reactions in totally unexpected ways. It’s avant-garde music that touches the body and the heart as well as the mind, sparse music of an exceptional physicality, simple music that seems complex and complicated: full of contradictions and possessed of an odd, untouchable, indefinable something. You’ll know it when you hear it: it’s an inner essence that’s impossible to reach directly, but impossible to miss when this album brings you there.

STYLUSMAGAZINE.COM'S ALBUM OF THE WEEK - JUNE 13 - JUNE 19, 2004