YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduO - To The Forest To Live A Truer Life - New LP Record 2023 Thrill Jockey Black Vinyl - Experimental Electronic

Inspired by how she feels at the moment, what direction she’s facing, the people she’s surrounded by, and the energy of the location, YoshimiO uses the piano and her voice to create sound. IzumikiYoshi uses a microphone to pick up the raw sounds created by YoshimiO and feeds it through his modular synthesizer, where the sounds undergo spectral processing and modulation. These electronic tones are combined and mixed again with YoshimiO’s live sounds in a spontaneous manner, to output the sounds that were only in their imagination. That is how the music of YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduO is created.

The duo’s debut album To The Forest To Live A Truer Life combines the thrill and precision of masterful improvised music practitioners unearthing new sonic possibilities. YoshimiO’s kinetic energy saturates the album’s every pore. For the first time using the piano as her primary instrument in addition to her singular voice, YoshimiO’s every move is bent, stretched, and mutated by IzumikiYoshi’s modular synthesizer into cascades of brightly colored waves and dotted constellations of sound. A balance of YoshimiO’s raw live improvisations and IzumikiYoshi’s correlated processed sounds give the pieces a sense of grounding and weightlessness in tandem. Stark piano figures that recall bluesy phrasings or classical progressions warp into beams of fizzling synthesizer. YoshimO’s voice undulates and echoes in wild tendrils. Rather than taming YoshimiO’s spirited performances, IzumikiYoshi adorns every unique flutter with complementary otherworldly textures. Recorded primarily in a cafe nestled in a forest in Japan, To The Forest To Live A Truer Life is a celebration of pure potential, of music born of the moment expanding in every direction. 

releases March 24, 2023

piano&voice / YoshimiO
modular synthesizer / izumikiYoshi

recorded by izumikiYoshimiO in the forest of maho-roba on Oct. 2020 and vocals fo #5 track recorded by KABAMIX @LMD on Mar. 2021

mixed and mastered by IZUMI KIYOSHI on Aug. 2021
words by YoshimiO

photo of poster by HOMMA TAKASHI
art work by OOIDO SYOUJOU, izumikiYoshimiO
designed by IZUMI KIYOSHI
translated by HASHIM KOTARO BHAROOCHA