The project of Cartografías pendulares is the recording of a free improvisation between Mitsuhisa Sakaguchi, Cal Lyall, Ernesto del Puerto and Yuko Cornale. Music, very well maybe like love, a universal language, but if so free improvisation is a rather peculiar kind of love, because it springs out of the exchange of individuals who didn’t necessarily know each other previously, and develops over the individual experiences of each artist only to underline those differences in an adventure with no clear departure station, nor planned destiny in sight.

I listened to the recording on a subway trip at rush hour in Mexico City, a challenging task that requires some physical and mental gymnastics in order to keep one’s sanity. In the overcrowded trains, along the long, long distances, it is ony natural to get lost in thought (the near homophony between train and trance is more than a happy accident), and people use their ear phones to facilitate their trances, make their long way home more bearable, get away from the surrounding oppressive massive city of which making sense is not easy. But as I was listening to Cartografías pendulares I found that this music was a perfect companion to my underground experience crossing the city, made me more aware, led me to a quickening of my reality rather than escape it, and I wondered why. How was it that a recording conceived in Japan in colaboration with two mexicans made perfect sense in a situation so specific, on another far side of the globe?

Yes the music is rich, in textures and brilliances, often surprising, it lures our full attention, but it was more than that. As I was holding for dear life on my sticky pole the music became an adaptation tool. The subway line car I was traveling on was built in the 80s, it’s design talked back then of a future where progress was waiting for us, and Paul Verhoeven, in adapting Total Recall, saw that it was the perfect set to bring to life Philip K Dick’s vision of a dystopian reality where destiny had already reached us, and left us behind. I still had to change to trains, and then experienced a glitch, sudenly I was somewhere ahead with no record of a chunk of time and space. What is a glitch? Its the opposite of a Dejá vu, its a leap in time, and the music was just the perfect link along the glitch, leaving nothing out of place. Science fiction is the fitting narrative for our times, its so adecuated to the signs of our political and technocratic reality that some of it’s most famous stories are already fulfilled prophecys. There is something in the music of Cartografías pendulares that is akin to science fiction, which is massively consumed in both Tokyo and Mexico City, because it speaks to us of what maybe already happening, and I think it’s because both cities are building a vertiginous future over ancient temples, converging very old signs with radical new ones that are taking over the whole world. Cartografías pendulares is, in its adventure, properly speaking, music of our time, which is a time no longer comprehensible in linear terms, and that must be why each track of the album was named after scenes of John Carpenter’s The Thing, a story of bodies mutating into a new kind of species, just at the edge of the known world.

The very particular history of noise in Japan developped a branch of free improvisation, known as Onkyokei, which I think plays an important part in the sound Yuko, Cal, Mitsuhisa and Ernesto found together. Onkyokei (roughly translated as both “sound” and “echo”) is a kind of minimalistic, maybe even oniric dimension of electronic music to which John Cage felt strongly attracted to. Cage, madly inlove with silence as the source and playfuly never reaching goal of sound, thought Zen could be found at the heart of it all. The album’s music, as I already mentioned, is rich in its language, and besides the disrupting experience of time and space belonging to a large both ancient and modern metropolis, there is another neighboring experience between japanese and mexican culture, a deep sense of spirituality, of inner search. For one of their concerts in Mexico City, the musicians decided to play in an open venue, in a wide public park. Arriving a few minutes late I was guided through the park by the music, a very tranquil, zoom like tide of low, long booming sax, crakling sustained voice, pin pointed electric guitar puntings and rasping intermitent synthesizer. As I approached the music was also looking around the sunday activities of families, children playing, dogs and a picnic here and there. Surrounding the group at the stage, playing what to unaccustomed ears could be rather strange and chaotically ammased sounds, there was a couple with their little kids playing in the grass, someone walking her dog, a young man was exercising, jumping the rope with his earphones attached. The young man, suddenly aware something else was going on, removed his earphones and simply resumed jumping the rope. Nothing in the course of a regular sunday in the park was disturbed by their music, merged with the everyday life. It was all perfectly natural.   

 Erick Vázquez

Cartografías pendulares, free improvisation byMitsuhisa Sakaguchi (synthesizer and intervened piano), Cal Lyall (electric guitar), Ernesto del Puerto (saxophone) and Yuko Cornale (voice), was recorded in Japan on 2025 by Nobuki Nishiyama, mixed by Yuko Cornale and mastered by Diego “Ninja” Juárez. Art cover by Gustavo Abascal and designed by Sara Norman and Cal Lyell, under the labels Venas Rotas Discos and Subvalent records.