April is the cruellest month is a re-issue of a seminal album in Japan’s free jazz scene from one of that movement's most forward-thinking practitioners, Masatuki Takatanagi (and yes the title is a TS Elliot reference). April is the cruellest month was initially slated for release in 1975 by the pioneering ESP-Disk imprint, but the label went bankrupt before the master could go to the presses. As a result, the album languished on a shelf until finally seeing a proper, Japan-only, release in 1991. The album has, as of just a few years ago, been distributed domestically to the USA, but it's been a hell of a wait (some might even characterize said wait as cruell [SIC]). April is the cruellest month captures Takayanagi’s “non-section music” phase, in which he experimented with a guitar to make unconventional and threshold pushing sounds that certainly have parallels in the work of Sun Ra and Jimi Hendrix, and which more than anticipated the clamorous and liberated structures of Merzbow, Acid Mothers Temple, and Michio Kurihara. If you are looking for something, deep, imaginative, and chaotic that somehow manages to maintain an air of calm and composure, then plug this into your brain and forget everything else you had planned for the day.
April is the cruellest month is out via Blank Forms Editions