By Philip Freeman | Published January 2026
Japanese keyboardist and composer Shoko Nagai has charged an impressive group of collaborators with executing some highly complex music on this album. The quartet includes trumpeter Pamela Fleming, whose range runs from jazz to klezmer to reggae; violinist Pauline Kim Harris, best known as half of the avant-garde duo String Noise; and drummer Kate Gentile, a fixture of Brooklyn’s jazz avant-garde who also loves death metal.
It would be an unorthodox instrumental palette even if Nagai was sticking to acoustic piano, but she doesn’t; she rolls out a battery of keyboards and noisemaking devices ranging from Fender Rhodes to literal toys and uses them to create sounds that whiz, ping, squiggle and caper, like a cross between Hiromi Uehara’s explosive prog fusion and the 1980s Synclavier experiments of Frank Zappa.
Everyone else is playing on the same level. Fleming offers everything from rippling fanfares to extended technique wheezes and puffs, while Harris’s violin is sometimes a perfect harmony instrument and other times a gentle pluck and still other times a shrieking wet cat, and Gentile’s percussion ranges from soft cymbal washes and subtle ticks and clatter to thundering art-rock beats. But the music, even as it leaps energetically from one idea to another, with some tracks lasting as little as 80 seconds, has a surprising amount of romanticism and sweep. It’s almost grandiose at times, but also has a strange intimacy and precise focus that’s mesmerizing.
