We Insist?

by Brian Olewnick An early release by Yoshihide, We Insist? finds the fascinating composer/improviser just beginning to stretch out his stylistic fingers into the multiple niches he would investigate in coming years. Found tapes, traditional Japanese songs, thrash rock, avant-garde jazz -- all were being introduced as grist to his enormous mill. In fact, several of the mostly short pieces here are much more rockish than listeners who came to Yoshihide later on will have reason to expect. Similar to John Zorn (who appears on two tracks here), Yoshihide appears to have gone through a period of fascination with the sheer, brutish energy of hardcore thrash bands and sought to capture and integrate that power into more experimental structures. Not that this fascination kept him from constructing waltzes or songs based on electronic cash register tapes. There's a general sense of wonder at the qualities of music and, indeed, pure sound in all its forms that emerges from this disc, a sense that would always be apparent in his subsequent work (and is clear from the titles of many of his pieces here). We Insist? (the question mark instead of an exclamation point perhaps indicating his acknowledgement of his own probing and searching) is a sampler of this superb artist really beginning to feel his oats and planting the seeds for years of profound exploration. Invaluable as a historical document, it also provides substantial pleasures of its own.