lthough she’s been around for quite a while on the outskirts of the modern improv scene, most prominently as a member of Otomo Yoshihide’s Ground-Zero, Tayutauta is Yumiko Tanaka’s first solo album. Her only previous solo venture was a suite of five tracks on the now long-gone Improvised Music From Japan 10-CD box set, and those short fragments of delicate improvisation were a fine primer for this album-length exploration.

Tanaka plays the futozao shamisen, a three-stringed instrument from which she extracts a soft array of sounds, from subdued scrapes, to slow, meditative plucking, to ratcheting and vibrating string-bends. Throughout all this, Tanaka’s music retains loose connections and associations with traditional Japanese music, as the sound of the shamisen is almost irrevocably linked to its long history in culture and music. But she has also managed to extract her instrument to a large degree from this cultural context, applying to it her own idiosyncratic techniques and a language that resists falling into the familiar patterns and sounds.

The whole of Tayutauta is dedicated to picking out subtle, delicate textures from the shamisen’s surprisingly varied sound palette. On each of the 10 tracks here, Tanaka zeroes in on a single mood or idea, rephrasing it with minute variations and playing around with different combinations until the essence of the idea has been expressed. Perhaps the best example of this is “Amayadori,” on which Tanaka spends much of the 13 minutes plucking tentative and sparsely positioned notes at an exceedingly low volume. Her extreme patience and sense of timing naturally brings to mind minimal guitar improvisers like Taku Sugimoto, and for the duration of this gorgeous piece she seems to be concentrating intently each time she touches her instrument’s strings. Each note, barely rising up at the lower limits of hearing, is a tickle on the surface of the soundless calm that overlays the track. This hush is somewhat daunting, almost sacred, and each time Tanaka interrupts the quiet, it’s imperative that her sounds be careful and considered, so as not to disturb the delicate atmosphere she’s created. This is taut and restrained, a perfect balance between sound and silence, between tension and beauty.

Elsewhere, Tanaka’s playing is slightly more expressive, though the disc remains fairly quiet. On “Yuki,” she explores grittier textures, playing hard and allowing the strings to reverberate noisily. The lengthy “Tayuta” veers into more straightforwardly melodic territory, before ending with a brief bit of simple unaccompanied singing that’s as unexpected as it is lovely. But it’s “Kaze ga Toku de” that provides one of the album’s finest moments, a lengthy examination of the shamisen’s harsher sounds, with Tanaka scraping and rubbing the strings to elicit sharp ringing tones and sustained scratchy vibrations. At times, the instrument sounds like a violin, or even an electronic generator, and this is even truer on the brief “Chirei,” which features metallic groans and pings that bear a surprising resemblance to Tetuzi Akiyama’s harsh electric guitar album Resophonie, although much sparser and gentler.

The delicacy and fragility of Tayutauta is its defining characteristic and, counter-intuitively, its most potent strength. In her liner notes, Tanaka compares the album’s first track, “Furuike ya,” with its cyclic ascending and receding shamisen figure, to the study of Zen Buddhism, and it’s an appropriate point of reference for much of this album. Running through this album is a gentle and thoughtful spirituality, not one tied to any particular ideology, but a genuine emotional relationship with the world and the acoustic space this music was recorded in. This spirituality is joined by an even more intense sensuality, a fundamental connection with the feel and texture of the instrument on display here; Tanaka knows her instrument intimately, and her every gesture is measured and calculated, informed by her attachment to the shamisen and its sounds. If it took an entire career of waiting and playing with others for her to get to the point where she could make a statement this perfect, this entrancing, this fully formed, it was well worth the wait.