Its been a while since I last heard something by Minoru Sato, who is best known from the highly conceptual label WrK which he ran from 1994 to 2006. They released musical works in a scientific context, from installations and such like, and dealt usually with one ‘thing’ per release. Later on he released a CD with Asuna on the Spekk label (see Vital Weekly 601), but then it was quiet again. Here he teams up with one Atsuo Ogawa, who draws and paints, but also plays the banjo and ‘provides voice’, at least on this disc. while Sato plays a self-built instrument, mysteriously named ‘RP3M’, and I have no clue what it is. They named themselves after a spaghetti western. All of the seven pieces were played through improvisation, and the shortest is just over two minutes and the longest close to nineteen. All of the pieces are played in the same slow tempo, and consist every time of the same thing: plucking the strings of the banjo, deep sighs (every now and then) and the obscure rattle coming from Sato’s instrument, which seems to me some kind of electronic thing, but at the same time I wouldn’t be surprised to know its something acoustic. Pieces sound strikingly similar at times, and one doesn’t know a new piece has started. Very much like a lot, if not all, of the previous work of mister Sato this has a strong conceptual edge, but whereas that previous work was almost drone like in approach, exploring sound phenomena, this one is from a more musical perspective and it doesn’t work too well for me. Well into the third, say about twenty minutes into this CD, I know what it is about, and then I find out that the whole thing is over fifty-five minutes; but I already know what it sounds like, so I don’t need to hear the entire release that extensively, save perhaps for ‘Rust’ and ‘Kettle’, two short ones in which, all of a sudden Sato’s instrument sound distinctly different, longer sustaining and drone like. Why not explore that a bit more? Thus one is left behind, bemused and puzzled, but perhaps not entirely satisfied.