Agencement (and all things Shimada) is one of those perennial faves, like Keiji Haino or John Wall, that I'll get stuck into good and hard for a solid interval—I'm in the middle of one such right now—and then leave alone for pretty much the rest of the year. It's good stuff to get stuck into, and unlike Haino the releases are so sporadic that it is possible to pull out pretty much everything and go through it all in a couple sittings. Give it a week or so and I'll have gone through it all, several times over. It is the details that really hone the attentions and invite the getting-in-of-the-stuck, and here (in the details, in their precision orientation, not to mention the not-quite-academic hemorrhaging of the sound palette) I can say there would be affinities with the John Walls of the world.
But what also comes through, every time, is how singular the very first encounters had registered via, just as FreakAnimalFinland says, some of the earlier noise(ish) comps, specifically
Sonic Exhibition 2,
Come Again,
Come Again II,
Noise & Junk Omnibus,
Land of the Rising Noise, probably in that order. I would in fact still hold aloft the Land of the Rising Noise track as the pinnacle in the Agencement-n-adjacent oeuvre. (OT. LotRN. A comp absolutely worth getting for the Haino track, which sounds like an outtake from Nijiumu PSF-7, and the Hijokaidan track, which ranks among their most vicious). Violin may be the principal tool but the meticulous reel to reel tape montage-ry scans in these holes as swarms of meticulously crafted glass-beaded insects forced through tightly constricted chromium apertures, subject to supreme heat and pressure, straining scritching squelching but never cracking. As FreakAnimalFinland notes, the willingness to allow the electronics-cum-tape to spool its way among the cracks can do wonders for those of certain auricular affiliations, the Spectralists notwithstanding. As far as the above comp tracks, auricularly speaking not, overall, so very far off the tape-processed side of
Viosphere, but at a sufficient, and sufficiently singular, remove. That there is so little in this vein (the Come Again and Come Again II tracks are identical!) just belabors the breath at the possibility that more might somewhere be prized.
A brevity's more can in fact be prized in the Art-Into-Life reissue of Viosphere, via bonus-opener "Previosphere", which could be from the same sessions that produced the Noise & Junk Omnibus track. As I write this I am somewhat hopefully encouraged to note that the N&JO track is the most recent (2021) to drop on Shimada's
bandcamp, so at least to suggest that interest in drilling down into similar veins might yet persist. And while some of the latest work under the Shimada name is not quite there, such as the
October Variations FreakAnimalFinland linked, above, or the
chitinous15b also dropped on bandcamp (2019), there are some quite excellent live recordings on Shimada's
youtube channel, and other
youtube channels, a pretty solid (2008) collab with Kuwayama Kiyoharua (aka Lethe) & Kiyoshi Mizutani, and a collab with Evan Parker and Roger Turner that I have on order and for which comment will have to wait.
Except that it behooves me to mention Shimada's involvement in a
4-way with Mikawa, Nobuo Yamada (aka Artbreakhotel), and Katsuyoshi Kou, which easily ranks among the harshest damn things any of them (Mikawa included!) have ever been involved with.
