Acid Mothers Temple’s guitarist extraordinaire Kawabata Makoto returns to his droning muse for this release, a meditative piece of guitar pyschedelia. Comprising two long pieces, O Si Amos… begins with the first recording of Makoto playing an acoustic guitar. Running the signal through 3 reverb units and a delay, the piece takes far too long (12 minutes of sub-Derek Bailey acoustic strumming nonsense) to get going, but when it does, the shimmering tones that are produced are like no others drawn from a simple acoustic.
Weaving shimmering phrases and drones, Makoto brings to mind the soundscapes of Robert Fripp’s more recent solo releases, especially Fripp’s collaboration with Jeffrey Fayman, A Temple in the Clouds. And this is extremely frustrating, this waiting for the greatness, or more accurately, wading through the chaff for the substance, even when conceding the point that AMT have never been particularly concerned with quality control. But here, like in most other Makoto-related recordings, it truly is worth working though the boring, repetitive, going-nowhere part of this record to reach some transcendent and beautiful drone.
Halfway into the piece the multiple reverb units and the original sound from the acoustic have combined into a curtain of sound, slowly rippling and moving, miles away from what one would have expected an acoustic guitar could sound like. This is a meditative piece for the ages. The second track, which occupies the bulk of the album, continues in a similar vein, but features Makoto on electric guitar, using the same delay/reverb setup.
The press material for the disc relates an enigmatic anecdote about a trip (not that kind of trip, at least I don’t think so) that Makoto took in Sardinia, where he experienced a spiritual climax, an epiphany. The revelations of this epiphany are not revealed, but the music, if one is to assume was created to approximate the epiphany-experience, sheds all needed light. Makoto appears to have found the harmonic nexus, a peaceful palace of infinite delay, infinite reverb, and ultimate melody. Headphones and some chemical preparation are all one needs to join him there.
O Si Amos A Essere Duas Umbras? is out now on Important Records.
