Taku Sugimoto - 6m (°2m/cenaug1*3).

From Principia Sugimatica (A Bruit Secret, 2005)

Anyone who's followed the career of Taku Sugimoto from the florid lyricism of Flagments of Paradise, with its Loren Connors-like melancholy strains, through the ever more sparse guitar duo releases with Kevin Drumm, Annette Krebs and Burkhard Stangl to the austerity of Futatsu with Radu Malfatti can't have failed to notice that the further Sugimoto advances the fewer notes he plays. Interesting parallels could be drawn with the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, in which case Sugimoto's "Hum", which calls for nothing more than amp buzz, could be the equivalent of Beckett's infamous "Breath", a "play" that many Beckett-watchers took to be the point of no return in the author's career. Of course it wasn't: Beckett continued to produce a substantial body of work after "Breath", and similarly, since "Hum", Sugimoto has launched himself into an extensive series of compositions using a notational system of his own, which he calls (Bertrand Russell must be smiling in the hereafter) Principia Sugimatica.

The Principia doesn't specify what to play in terms of precise pitches, though it would be relatively easy for the notation to include this information. Actual sounding musical events are either long notes (semibreves), which are allowed to decay, or short ones, which are not allowed to resonate. The former are represented in the notation by "°", the latter by a simple dot, "." Duration is specified in minutes ("m") or seconds ("s"), and subdivided by the use of the slash "/". Events or groups of events can be repeated, singly or in groups, which is indicated by the multiplication sign "*". To take a straightforward example, then: ". 1m/3" indicates that a duration of one minute is to be divided into three equal units (of 20 seconds), each beginning with a short sound. Whether the sound is to be the same each time isn't specified, though that's the approach Sugimoto adopts on the Principia Sugimatica album. To thicken the plot slightly, ".1m/center" requires the performer to "put a dot in the center of one minute," which, as the composer admits, "is not easy. What I am aiming at is that, if the duration of the single dot is 0.4 seconds, it is played at 0.2 seconds before 00'30". Thus, "1m(30s .30/1)" is not completely equal to ".1m/center".." Fair enough.

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