Eiko Ishibashi ★★★★
Evil Does Not Exist
DRAG CITY. DL/LP
It’s in the trees. It’s coming…
Eiko Ishibashi’s importance to the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is evidently so great he now seems to be constructing entire films around her musical prompts, rather than vice versa. That’s the apparent backstory to Evil Does Not Exist, with Ishibashi asking Hamaguchi to shoot some footage to accompany her live shows, and Hamaguchi parlaying the idea into a beautiful and unsettling full-length movie, set mostly in deep forest outside Tokyo. After the brilliantly empathetic work she did for Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car, his attachment is understandable, and Ishibashi’s latest score is again subtle, delicate, but robust enough to blossom away from the film itself. It’s her balancing of disparate elements that’s so impressive: Górecki strings, microtonal electronica, a flutter of jazz drums, ECM atmospheres, a little Metheny-ish guitar provided by Jim O’Rourke. A score where the serene and the unsettling are flipsides of the same coin – much, of course, like the film it accompanies.
ALSO RELEASED
Clearing
ASTRAL EDITIONS. DL/LP
The Ohio duo’s second terrific album of 2024, following Activator with drummer Jayson Gerycz, finds Jen Powers’ hammered dulcimer and Matthew J Rolin’s guitars in full unanchored flight. Peridot’s opening grind suggests kinship with the new Dirty Three album, but the ensuing multi-string fantasias align them closer to Robbie Basho; ecstatic backporch sessions mapping a trajectory from the rustic to the cosmic.
Cygnus A
CENTRIPETAL FORCE. DL/LP
There’s a small trend of virtuoso fingerpickers moving outside their comfort zones, exemplified by the ongoing work of Drew Gardner. As half of Elk
