Tokyo’s Ftarri organisation (which evolved out of the Improvised Music From Japan label) proved its reputation for high quality improvised and lower case music many times over the last 20 years. What’s new since the Covid-19 pandemic, however, is how Ftarri has continued to expand and innovate, releasing many recordings from its own shop cum performance space in Tokyo, and working with likeminded collaborators from around the world playing in everything from an underpass in Beijing to a high end studio in Switzerland. “The number of overseas musicians coming to Japan has increased dramatically,” notes boss Yoshiyuki Suzuki. This now gives the label a wide pool of ensembles to work with, and an ability to spring a surprise that preserves some of the freshness and potency central to the ethos of improvised music. Recent years have been among Ftarri’s busiest ever, with upwards of 20 releases dropped via the label’s various sublabels in both 2023 and 2024.

The selections of music presented here can all be heard via Ftarri’s Bandcamp page, which gives a detailed overview of its activities, and presents a beautiful gallery of artist Cathy Fishman’s colourful album covers. But the true experience of Ftarri’s work is to hear the music in full via CD or digital download, where you can experience the pauses and lacunae along with the musicians, and tune into the biorhythms of the players away from your internet browser.

FEN
“1”
From 4 × 4 (2025)

This album on Ftarri’s Meenna sublabel, set aside for group recordings, documents a performance by Far East Network. Their recordings have an openness of instrumentation and ethos that manages to break new ground, even in a musical field which explicitly strives to avoid genre and convention. And with the members of the quartet spread across South East Asia, they exemplify the international connections of Ftarri’s ever growing peer to peer network. Ryu Hankil is known for using the sonic potential of everyday objects from paper to typewriter; Yan Jun uses field recordings and site-specific performances to interrogate the power of sound and silence; Otomo Yoshihide and Yuen Chee Wai use guitars as launchpads for experimentation but freely borrow sounds from elsewhere. The recording’s recurrent ticks and clicks, swooping and looming judders, and electrical ground loop hum, all evoke something between a science laboratory and a craft person’s bespoke repair shop, and resonate with the work of many sound artists incorporating everyday sounds into their art.

Li Song/Zhao Cong/Zhu Wenbo
“Three Lines (Excerpt)”
From Tangerine And The Invisible (2025)

From a brand new disc recorded at the Ftarri performance space, Tangerine And The Invisible pits two catalytic players in Beijing’s underground music scene, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo, against London based musician and programmer Li Song. “Three Lines” features Wenbo’s “transducer elastic rope feedback system”, which might be at the heart of the hovering, drawn-out high end tones which haunt this performance like a dragon fly waiting to strike.

Otomo Yoshihide
“Turntable And Harmonium Solo”
From Hummingbird And Four Flowers: Turntable And Harmonium Solo Live (2024)

2022 was the tenth anniversary of the opening of Ftarri’s store in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo. Suzuki explains how “the previous tenant used the space as a darkroom for developing photos, so the walls were originally black, and I just used them as they were (although I did repaint them when I first rented the space).” This small but flexible space was celebrated with a series of ten concerts featuring many of the veterans of Japanese improvised music, from Tetuzi Akiyama to Toshimaru Nakamura. “Each concert was a solo concert featuring a musician who has had a deep connection to Ftarri since the Improvised Music From Japan era,” says Suzuki. This performance by Yoshihide saw him pick up a harmonium in the store and play it alongside his turntable, which culminated in wild explosions of screeching and farting that rival any noise gig.

David Toop/Ecka Mordecai/Christian Kobi
”moth wings beating air incised (excerpt)”
From moth wings beating air incised (2024)

From the cacophonous to the down low, this performance from London’s Cafe Oto plays, as its title suggests, on activities around the border of inaudibility, using instruments including leaves, card and flutes. Around Mordecai’s cello and Kobi’s reed instruments, the air and atmosphere of the venue take on a meditative presence in their own right.

Taizo Hida
“The Rain Traces Its Outline (Excerpt)”
From The Rain Traces Its Outline (2024)

“It's becoming more and more common for improvisational musicians to perform using mainly text and graphic scores,” Suzuki says. In response Ftarri launched a sublabel for classical and composed works in 2021, which has widened the remit and the palette of Ftarri significantly, just as it did in the past with UK label Another Timbre. This patient and spacious piece by Taizo Hida, performed by Masamichi Kinoshita, comprises “609 chords and single notes, each sustained for about five seconds”, and creates a similar kind of translucent shifting colour field as the work of pianist Melaine Dalibert.

Morgan Evans-Weiler & Carlo Costa
“Concept 1 (Cymbal)”
From Object, Monochord, Circle (2025)

Recorded in a basement in New York, this ingenious set of tracks explores compositions for violin and percussion which directs sounds to be played together in parallel, with short intervals in between. The use of pauses is both familiar from modern improvised music but somehow qualitatively quite different from it, punching irregular windows in the recording that disrupts any sense of intentionality or flow and forces the listener into reflection.

Tam Thi Pham/Yukiko Shiina Sakurazawa/Minami Takei/Masahide Tokunaga
“First Set”
From Ftarri Gathering (2024)

This appearance of Vietnamese born, Germany based musician Tam Thi Pham at this gig at Ftarri underlines the current international scope of Suzuki’s label. Pham plays the one-string dan bau instrument, accompanied by bass, percussion and horn, and the instrument’s wavering high pitched notes create an urgent, mercurial and unstable centre of the performance.

Lingens/Soloveitzik/Nakamura/Hatano/Yamagishi
“PLAY – 100 Playing Cards For Ensemble”
From PLAY – 100 Playing Cards For Ensemble (2025)

Perhaps nothing better represents Ftarri’s open field of possibilities than this performance of a composition by Hannes Lingens, held at Ftarri, which runs to almost 80 minutes, and is by turns quizzical, uproarious, graceful and bizarre. Lingens’s piece directs musicians to play using 100 cards with brief instructions, and the unusual instrumentation of viola, soprano sax, no-input mixing board and percussion creates a mix of intensity and incongruity that stays long in the memory.

Read Derek Walmsley’s full Unlimited Editions report on Ftarri in The Wire 499. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.