Album of the Day 6/29/11

Day two in Halifax wouldn’t have been complete without a leisurely hourlong stroll to Fairview Lawn Cemetery and the graves of the Titanic victims – many of them still unidentified – who weren’t so badly decomposed that they were thrown back into the water after checking to see if they had I.D. on them. In the meantime, as we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Wednesday’s album, #580, is an aptly creepy one:

Minamo – Kuroi Kawa

Minamo is Japanese for “surface of the water;” Kuroi Kawa means “black river.” This largely improvisational double-cd duo album by Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii and American violinist Carla Kihlstedt is aptly titled: it’s menacing, often impenetrable and sometimes downright macabre. There are playful moments – a musical lolcat, and two sisters struggling to open a window – but most of it is just plain white-knuckle intense. Kihlstedt moves from a whisper to a scream and back again against Fujii’s murderous cascades, ghostly music-box interludes and raw assaultiveness. It ends with long, color-coded suite: the rain-drenched Blue Slope; the head-on attack of Purple Summer; the surprisingly carefree Red Wind, hallucinatory Green Mirage and lethal, relentless snowstorm that winds up well over an hour’s worth of music. It came out on Tzadik in 2009 and still hasn’t made it to the usual sites but is well worth tracking down if raw adrenaline is your thing.

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