A Review for LP Kuda-gitsune “Cistern Hymns” form Crucial Blast Online Shop:

“Cold, creeping industrial deathscrape meets eerie free-jazz on the debut offering from the LA-based Kuda-Gitsune, a new duo that takes its name from a fox-spirit that appears in Japanese folklore, and which features saxophonist Ken Kawamura from the experimental jazz group Crepuscule Trio and Japanese noise artist Banetoriko. I love the kind of dark industrial free-jazz that these folks create here; Cistern Hymns features six tracks of creepy, atmospheric scrape n’ blurt that combine eerie sax lines with a fairly restrained backdrop of almost-ambient noise. It’s not the Borbetomagus-style level of nuclear assault that I had originally expected when I first heard about this project, although Banetoriko’s amplified metal scrapings, bouts of rhythmic clanking and gritty, textural noise does at times remind me of some of Donald Miller’s more restrained passages of concrete guitar abuse. Rather, Kuda-Gitsune are closer in spirit and execution to the industrial/jazz deathscapes of Japan’s Dislocation, with a similar blend of musical noir-esque sax lines and freeform horn vomit, and subdued electrical drones/pulses contrasting with quick blasts of skull-melting noise. There are long stretches of minimal scrape and howl scattered across the record where it feels as if the duo is slipping into a strange ritualistic experience; piercing feedback tones are carefully wound like barbed-wire around rumbling percussive noises, and broken rhythms briefly emerge, slow stomping metallic clanks that quickly fade back into the shadows, replaced by swells of thick grinding distortion that seep in, sometimes swallowing up the saxophone entirely. Kawamura’s sax lines are often layered on top of each other, to excellent effect; some of his melodic playing seemingly has an Ornette Coleman influence that’s certainly pleasing to hear, but as the duo slowly build into louder, noisier bouts of dystopian rumble, progressing onto the b-side as the feedback and scraping metallic reverberations gain in volume and aggression, Kawamura starts blowing harder, more abstract lines with lots of tension-building pauses, taking this into a harsher and more unsettling direction as the side ends up in a strange din of fluttering, cicada-like buzzing, barking electronics and random metallic clanking and freeform percussion at the end, the ghostly sax drifting behind this creepy malformed noisescape as it fades into the shadows. Overall, this is pretty creepy stuff that would probably appeal to fans of the ritualistic jazz-tinged darkness of bands like Klangmutationen, Gravetemple and Calcination.”

Wonderful Review!! The record is available at:

http://www.crucialblastshop.net/