Watch GO KUROSAWA Transcend Time & Space In His KEXP In-Studio Session

On April 6th, Go Kurosawa stopped by the iconic Seattle independent radio station KEXP for an in-studio session with Cheryl Waters. Thanks to a connection there, we were able to act like big shots and sit in the little control room during the recording. The audio was broadcast live on air, but the video was only just released on YouTube today. It can take a little while to edit and mix these sessions, so I wasn’t expecting something taped last month to have this quick a turnaround.

This wasn’t Go‘s first time visiting KEXP; his old band, Kikagaku Moyo has a long history with the station and Cheryl in particular. This time, the Guruguru Brain label founder was there to promote his tremendous solo debut, Soft Shakes. To tour the record through North America, Kurosawa needed to assemble a live band, and the results couldn’t be better. Assisting him with his tunes was a crack team of players comprised of Nashville-based musicians Rich Ruth (guitar), Taro Yamazaki (bass), and Ross McReynolds (drums), along with Ben Hackett (woodwinds, keys) out of Athens, Georgia. As wild as it sounds, at the time of this taping, they were only about 10 days into playing together as a unit.

I was fortunate enough to catch their first-ever performance at Vinyl Tap in Nashville, followed by the last half of their set at Knoxville‘s Big Ears Festival, 2 days later. The night before the KEXP session, I was at their concert at Neumos in Seattle. Each show was different, and it was really cool to witness the evolution as they became more comfortable and aware of the songs and each other. The first show was great because something was being born, emerging, and coalescing in real time. By the Seattle show, they were a well-oiled machine able to improvise freely and venture into any direction of their choosing. It’s clear that Go is not only open to his players taking liberty with his compositions but encourages them to unleash their respective voices. He thrives off those explorations.

This radio session presents the band in a more restrained form, due to the format. They can’t really go into a full-on 12-minute space rock K-hole when their presence on air is limited, but they find their way to approach something similar with a slightly more delicate landing. The allotted time is better utilized for quantity to better demonstrate the broader range of the project. If Go and Soft Shakes are anything, it’s diverse. That said, their performance is nothing to (soft) shake a fist at, and it isn’t safe. The balance, control, and nuance they employ are actually incredibly impressive. They still get weird with it. Their abilities are on full display. Now that they’ve cracked the formula, they can spin these songs in any direction, adjust tempo, stall them out, walk the dog, and go around the world with it like a Yo-Yo master at a school assembly. The raw power is invigorating, but the gentle touch hits differently and highlights precision. In the KEXP session, they get tai chi with it. It’s meditation in motion.

The video is posted below. After you check it out, consider watching additional clips from the tour if you can find them. As great as it is, this only provides a glimpse into what they pulled off during a very brief window of time. The tour is over, Kurosawa flew back to Japan, and the members have dispersed to the various other projects each is involved in. Maybe this exact arrangement has reached its conclusion, but we’re hoping to see this crew reform in some capacity in the future.