Izumi Kimura: Butterfly Effect

Japanese pianist Izumi Kimura has earned plaudits through her various improvisation-based projects with double bassist Barry Guy, percussionist Gerry Hemingway, and guitarists Christy Doran and Tommy Halferty, to cite just a few of her principal collaborators. But Kimura, a long-term resident in Ireland, is equally compelling when going it alone. Over the years, she has clocked up many a solo concert, but Butterfly Effect marks only the second solo recording in her increasingly impressive discography.

It comes fifteen years after Asymmetry (Diatribe Records, 2010), her imaginative response to compositions by Irish and Japanese composers. On that outing, The Irish Times hailed Kimura's "heroic levels of technical fearlessness," a description that will likely resonate with anyone who has seen the pianist in concert. A case in point was Kimura's memorable performance of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes—twenty pieces for prepared piano—on a 1939 Steinway at the Galway Jazz Festival 2016. Prepared piano is also Kimura's tool of choice on Butterfly Effect, whose botanical song titles, rendered in both English and Irish, were chosen after the fifteen improvisations were recorded.

Fifteen pieces—ranging from impressionistic miniatures that come and go like rippling breezes to more robust, episodic extrapolations—showcase Kimura the conceptualist rather than the virtuoso musician. The juxtapositions of damped and open strings, pulsing rhythmic motifs and slower, curling melodies, low-end rumble and high-register chime make for hypnotic music of trance-like quality.

Dreamy music-box melodies evoke childhood reverie, rhapsodic billows paint bolder emotional tableaus, though neither the pointillistic details nor the broader brushstrokes last for long in Kimura's ever-unfolding sonic tapestries. Altered string tension elicits Indonesian gamelan-esque textures—a recurring feature—here and West African balafon sonorities there. Elsewhere, Kimura coaxes percussive ripples of hang-like grace. Dissonance is notable for its absence, though just occasionally, bent notes and metallic rustling inject slivers of angularity at odds with the general melodicism.

Curiously meditative, the quickening and slowing of rhythmic pulses and the contrasts between playful lightness and brooding gravitas ensure that the music never lapses into pat ambient pastures. In fact, Kimura's use of space between notes—of silences as stepping stones—imbues her creations with an edgy expectancy. And there is a kind of chiseled beauty in her playing that reveals itself both in the moment and over the course of time.

A singular entry in Kimura's discography, Butterfly Effect entices from the first note to the twenty-second silence that cushions the final improvisation. This is an enchanting, mazy work that should appeal to dreamers and experimenters everywhere.