Dreams And Dust: Two From Pianist Izumi Kimura

2025 will go down as a busy year for Ireland-based, Japanese pianist Izumi Kimura. The first half of the year served up the solo album Butterfly Effect (Codama Records) and Glacial Voyage (Between The Lines)—the latter a free-form duo collaboration with guitarist Christy Doran. Both albums favored explorations of mood and textures over virtuosity. Two further collaborative albums once again find Kimura on improvisational terrain, though they are quite different in character. Taken together, these albums are windows onto Kimura the improvisor, the conceptualist and the soundscaping artist.

Seven Dreams
Izumi Kimura, Dominique Pifarély, Lina Andonovska
Fundacja Sluchaj
2025

This live recording from the National Concert Hall, Dublin, in May, 2022, finds Izumi Kimura in the company of Australian flautist Lina Andonovska and French violinist Dominique Pifarély. All three musicians are renowned for their virtuosity, the breadth of their respective projects and an affinity for improvised music. These seven pieces, ranging between three and ten minutes in duration, are spontaneous dialogues of broad-spectrum dynamics and no little lyricism.

Despite scratching, wheezing strings, the percussive flutter and pop of flute pads and the pluck and flashing strum of piano strings the music never falls into outright abstraction. The closest the trio comes to experimental soundscaping is on "Dream Op. 1," an edgy, twitchy encounter where the contrast between low-end piano and high-pitched violin stirrings is pronounced. On the whole, the dialogues take shape quickly, with tentative undercurrents giving way to sure-footed momentum and collective potency.

There are several duets. Piano and flute ("Dream Op. 2"), violin and flute ("Dream Op. 3") and piano and violin ("Dream op. 4")—team-tagging that makes for a more varied sonic experience. The contrasts between soft-toned lyricism and urgency, between legato lines and staccato riffing are striking. But it is when all three voices intertwine and overlap, reaching out to one another, that the music is at its most adventurous and its most rewarding.

A poem by Mary Rafferty adorns the CD gatefold. It speaks of earth's groans and tremors. It talks of the song of extinct birds and of sacred ritual. It alludes to the unthought and of dreaming—who says that words cannot capture music?

How The Dust Falls
Izumi Kimura & Gerry Hemingway
Auricle Records
2025

How The Dust Falls is the second duo collaboration between pianist Izumi Kimura and drummer/percussionist Gerry Hemingway and comes less than 18 months after Kairos (Fundacja Sluchaj, 2023). The two musicians know each other pretty well, having first performed as duo in 2016. They also play in a trio with bassist Barry Guy, documented on the excellent live album Illuminated Silence (Fundacja Sluchaj, 2019).

Speaking of her duo with Hemingway in a 2023 interview Kimura said: "It feels very natural as well as wonderfully challenging. There are a lot of elements in our duo. It feels like anything is possible." Chief among the elements are space, intimacy, textural ambiguity, percussive colors and rhythmic elasticity. So too, the juxtaposition of minimalism and expansive expression—heard to good effect on "Waterspear," where Kimura's repeated two-note motif carves a steady course against Hemingway's bustling polyrhythms. Hemingway revels in the sounds he can conjure from skin, wood and metal—toggling between the nooks and crannies of his kit, and dealing in woody marimba rhythms and dreamy vibraphone atmospherics.

Kimura also explores the piano's sonic possibilities—damping or strumming strings, working the keyboards extremities to conjure bold contrasts, and dealing alternatively in insistent riffs and scurrying runs. On "Wishing Well" damped strings chime like an old clock. When pianist and percussionist lock horns in unison as on "Entrainments II," or jam on rhythmic ideas as on "Entrainments I," the results are thrilling.

Atmospherics are a big part of the duo's language. At times, the provenance of a gong-like sound or of a ghostly drone are unclear. Both Kimura's pedal-sustained low notes—doomy and brooding—and Hemingway's animalistic "singing" into drum-head skin produce otherworldly sounds. Whale song suggests itself more than once. Easier to decipher are Hemingway's lyrics on the homely blues that is "This Waiting Place"—roughly inspired by Blind Willie Johnson's gospel-blues hymn "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground."

Whether treading the waters of meditative abstraction or fueling each other' rhythmic pulses, Kimura's and Hemingway's improvised exchanges are constantly stimulating.

Tracks and Personnel

Seven Dreams

Tracks: Dream Op. 3; Dream Op. 2; Dream Op. 6; Dream Op. 4; Dream Op. 3; Dream Op. 5; Dream Op. 8; Dream Op. 9.

Personnel: Izumi Kimura: piano; Dominique Pifarély: violin; Lina Andonovska: flutes.

How The Dust Falls

Tracks: Waterspear; Third Story; Corners; Dock Driftings; Starbook; Entrainments I; Stillness; Perimeter; Entrainments II; This Waiting Place; Chimneys; Shadowshift; Arrivals; Wishing Well.

Personnel: Izumi Kimura: piano; Gerry Hemingway: drums, marimba, vibraphone, harmonica, voice.

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