This collaboration between Portugal’s Beautiful Schizophrenic, aka Jorge Mantas, and Japan’s Yui Onodera, who previously made beautiful music with Celer, opens with unobtrusive ambient grace. Onodera picks out a hesitant melody on piano over a gently billowing synthesizers, wafting like powder trailing off a passing moth.
This collaboration between Portugal’s Beautiful Schizophrenic, aka Jorge Mantas, and Japan’s Yui Onodera, who previously made beautiful music with Celer, opens with unobtrusive ambient grace. Onodera picks out a hesitant melody on piano over a gently billowing synthesizers, wafting like powder trailing off a passing moth. “Akathisia” immediately ruins the mood by simply living up to its name, the medical term for unpleasant sensations of restlessness. It is as disagreeable here as it would be in reality. Fortunately, this is the only time Night Blossom stumbles, as the duo return to the same instrumental and mental configuration as the first track with “Nubian Clouds over Saskia,” bringing to mind a lighter, brighter Eno and Budd. It seems capable of drifting endlessly.
On “Washing in Slow Colours,” Mantas prepares rougher ground, a prickly static field onto which the always-welcome Masayoshi Fujita strews round, plummy tones on vibraphone. Fujita’s burgeoning recording career, which includes two albums under the El Fog name and collaborations with Jan Jelinek and MimiCof, shows nothing but promise. “Siamese Bloom” also has a raspy texture layered over with field recordings of crickets, through which Taishi Kamiya’s saxophone and random electronic notes deftly avoid one another in mid-bumblebee flight.
Another guest artist with two stellar, innovative albums to her name, Miko, appears on the finale, “This Crying Age,” dramatically whispering a poem in Japanese against a background which merges advancing synthesizers with an echoing transit hall full of human buzz into an urban elegy.
Night Blossom is available on Whereabouts. [Buy at iTunes]
