Watching KAKUHAN at last week’s Insomnia festival in Tromsø, Norway, I was struck by how a duo performing with only a sampler and cello can sound simultaneously amorphous and cohesive. Consisting of Koshiro Hino – he of Osaka’s goat (jp) – and cellist Yuki Nakagawa, KAKUHAN forged their sound on the 2022 debut Metal Zone. Hino’s percussive abrasions pan, pop and cascade as Nakagawa’s use of echo boxes and other effects dissolve expectations of what the cello ought to sound like. The duo slip between sonic states like lucid dreamers, combining dance rhythms, scraping drones, post-classical footwork, artillery snares and a frigid bass that hits the body like oceanic waves. Live it is sometimes difficult to tell who is responsible for which sound, a characteristic formally exploited on Repercussions, their collaborative album with the Polish percussionist Adam Gołębiewski.
Gołębiewski has worked with experimental luminaries like Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Kevin Drumm, Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark. His approach to the kit is gestural, creating moments of tension and resistance between different materials that have, as he told Claire Biddles in a recent tQ interview, “something in common with almost every instrumental practice, as well as the traditional method of firestarting.” Cymbals are bowed, wood is caned and metal filed. Nothing is extraneous with each movement considered for its impact and textural potential. Gołębiewski, Hino and Nakagawa first combined forces at Unsound in Kraków in 2023. Their improvised set was soon followed by a recording session, engineered by Rafał Drewniany at KPD Studio, that capitalised on their new-found momentum and chemistry.
The ten compositions on Repercussions (notice the wordplay evoking recurring percussion) came together spontaneously and this is echoed in the numerical tracks titles. The atmosphere evolves gradually with Gołębiewski responding to Hino’s skittering beats with rasping cymbal work and intermitted hi-hats on ‘II’. Nakagawa comes in with tentative pizzicato towards the end but his cello on ‘XIII’ takes on a prominent role. Using a curved bow, which allows all four strings to connect with the horse hair, Nakagawa summons a sound not unlike wounded bears grunting in the distance. Gołębiewski responds with his own bow, which slides across the cymbal edge to generate highly textured overtones that recall freight trains braking in the depot at midnight.
Throughout the album each member finds ample opportunities to mimic his colleagues. Whether it’s Gołębiewski’s pounding snare on ‘I’ that screams to be digitised, Hino’s rumbling samples that cosplay beaters rubbing against drumheads, or indeed Nakagawa’s chameleonic strings, which on ‘IV’ evoke tainted flutes, but elsewhere masquerade as electrical signals, it seems improbable that Repercussions was composed and recorded in a single improvised session. While Alicja Pakosz’s cover painting of a knife splitting a jet of water points to the more abrasive passages of the record, the album title suggests a quietly confident intention. Performing together, KAKUHAN & Adam Gołębiewski are drawing on their extended collective experience in sound to form and ignite a credible world out of thin air.
