Meenna, the Improvised Music From Japan sublabel focused on group releases, has just announced a new album composed by Taku Sugimoto. The album is simply entitled Septet and will be released on November 29th. You can hear samples from the album above. The album is taken from a live recording of the piece's world premiere at NK Project in Berlin back in March. The album is 38 minutes long and features Rebecca Lane, Michael Thieke, Johnny Chang, Koen Nutters, Derek Shirley, Bryan Eubanks, and Taku Sugimoto himself. The press release for the album describes it as such:
This composition is conceived of as a sort of double concertino for clarinet, flute, and small ensemble. However, the two main instruments, clarinet and flute, make no melody: the one tone is shared and repeated by them. I want to have the other instruments (viola, cello, contrabass, guitar, and sine-tone generator) work as if they are drawing several spectrums with the sound of the clarinet or flute, so each of these instruments has a specific set of microtones to play. In order to make it easier to produce those microtones, the stringed instruments are tuned anomalously; only harmonics or open strings are played. The very low frequencies are produced only by the sine-tone generator, since these frequencies are too low to play with any musical instrument except piano.
You can read more information about the album here.