TETUZI AKIYAMATetuzi Akiyama

This was Akiyama’s fourth visit to Porto, but the first in more than 7 years and a great opportunity to see/listen to a musician that has been playing in Europe less frequently each year. This concert was accompanied by a live visuals act by Ana Carvalho, a video artist from Porto. Somewhere between the motorbike rider of the vast American desert and the restrained samurai warrior, the Japanese guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, connects the dots of the improbable link between the US’ southern blues, electroacoustic improvisation, psychedelic rock and something not entirely definable from Japanese culture. From spectral near-silence to full-on drone, we find a textural essence in Akiyama’s music that is beyond the immediate acoustic properties of the guitar and inhabits the space between streams of more familiar lineages including folk, rock, blues and improvised music. The search for a primitivism that links the musician directly to the instrument and its multiple resonances is the narrative throughout Akiyama’s discography which adds up to more than 50 records, 12 of which are solo recordings. The beginnings go back to the late 80s with the groups Madhar and Hykio String Quartet and the collaborations with guitarists Taku Sugimoto and Toshimaru Nakamura. Up to the first solo album, Relator from 2001 – the initial sketches of the samurai sword scrapped blues – he contributed to the birth of Onkyo, a minimalist musical style concerned with the texture of noisy silence and linked to the improvisation sessions at the mythical Off Site gallery in Tokyo (which also served as a base of cross-pollination between improvised music from the East and West). In the 00s, his album outings grew exponentially both with solo improvisations and collaborations with other musicians. Akiyama’s solo albums alternate between personal delicate melodies which suggest both a common ancestor of the post-Takoma of Jack Rose or Sir Richard Bishop as well as a kind of pre-Mississippi language or pan-Asiatic traditions (Route 13 to the Gates of Hell or Pre-Existence, both from 2005) and free-form and oblique approaches focused on micro- and over-tones, phantasmagorical echoes, silence and noise (Résophonie from 2002 or Terrifying Street Trees from 2006). Let’s not forget, of course, the loud-as-hell drone-blues from Don’t Forget to Boogie (2003). In collaborative albums he teamed up recurrently with guitarists (Oren Ambarchi, Tom Carter, Alan Licht, Greg Malcolm, Michel Henritzi) and electronic/electroacoustic musicians (Toshimaru Nakamura, Jason Kahn, Günter Müller, Hervé Boghossian, Utah Kawasaki). He also participated as a player in other musicians albums, including Otomo Yoshihide (in his Portable Orchestra from 2001, Ensemble Cathodefrom 2002, the Masao Adachi’s Prisioner soundtrack from 2007) or in David Sylvian’s Manafon (2009). Independent music magazine The Wire wrote, in 2005, that Akiyama was “challenging for the title of most interesting guitarist on the planet - hyperbolic or not, we’re certain that the Japanese possesses an unique sensibility and methodical determination and that with his guitar, acoustic or electric, prepared or bare-naked, he continues to open a route without compromises.