Soft Mountain
Hux Rec. Soft Mountain (JAP/UK,rec.2003,pub.2007)***'
In 2003 Elton Dean and Hugh Hopper from Soft Machine invited Hoppy Kamiyama whom Hugh Hopper met at the Gong Family tour, to play some time together. Hoppy in his turn invited Yoshida Tatsuya (whom Hugh had met a few years before when he was playing with Acid Mothers Temple). Hoppy booked a studio in Tokyo to improvise something together, in between some local Soft Machine concerts. This was done completely without discussion or plan or structure, and led to two tracks of 45 minutes, which unfortunately were both cut to 30 minutes, because a CD can only contain a bit over 60 minutes. Most of the time Elton Dean leads the free improvisation (sax), while especially Tatsuya still feels he has free playtime to improvise with micro-rhythms. Hoppy Kamiyama tries to get some improvisation in, but with the demanding energy sax, cannot help it but increase the wall-effect of the sound. Also Hugh Hopper at first tries to bring in some thematical tensions for change, but it takes a very long time before also he can do anything else but following the same solo-active energy. After 12 minutes, Hoppy Kamiyama (keyboards) leads the score for a short while, and then Elton takes it over with more energy than before, leading to the wildest moment of the first track, on bass and drums, still within the wall effect of the improvisation, with some fine bass but still with no space or breaks for anything else. The second part is even more a closed-eyes continuum affair, until after 7 minutes, a fuzz bass theme brings in variety. Also here, the sax keeps on heading in the same forward direction, after a while, Hugh Hopper finds cleverly another bass theme drive, which leads to some more melodic themes on sax, which immediately makes the group entity more moody and mercurial, with a more attractive vivid dialoguing interaction. There even comes some swing in it, but then the music quickly comes to an end because of the 30 minute limit allowed to have both tracks on one CD. I wish they had done a double CD instead, because now I feel there’s something missing, and it makes the improvisation too random and spread with ideas, and split up at the wrong moment, to feel like a successful complete moment, with its logic of building up and a real conclusive finish.
