Jean-Luc Guionnet & Daichi Yoshikawa premiere track off upcoming album Intervivos on Empty Editions

“You don’t need me to tell you how it sounds, or how to listen […] this record begins when you play it.”
– Seymour Wright, from Intervivos’s liner notes

Ready to begin, then?

Good, because we’ve just gotten word that prolific Parisian saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet and Japanese sound artist Daichi Yoshikawa have teamed together for a new album. Titled Intervivos, the collaborative debut is described as “a speculative ‘electronic’ music created through the ritualistic misuse of acoustic instruments” that’s “exalted in both its turbulence, and in its extreme testing of improvisational reality.”

It’s set to be released early next month, in a very meticulously-presented edition of just 500, on 180-gram vinyl “in a letterpress on Foldkraft paper sleeve.” And today, TMT is honored to have a hand of its own in that meticulous presentation. That’s right: it’s premiere time.

Recorded during a week-long residency at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery and mastered by Rashad Becker, along with the rest of the album, the opening track “1” is a truly brutal experiment, sounding from neither the past nor the future. It functions more like a sonic artifact, with Guionnet’s haunting alto techniques pumped viciously through Yoshikawa’s maddening modulation, leaving behind distorted-yet-glowing sounds that are as disturbing as they are enchanting.

Listen to “1” below, and make sure to check out the full release on February 9 via Berlin’s Empty Editions. Intervivos marks the platform’s second release, following 2016’s excellent Last Signs of Speed by Eli Keszler.

Intervivos tracklisting:

01. 1
02. 2
03. 3
04. 4

More about: Daichi Yoshikawa, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Rashad Becker