Driftworks

Listening to the dark ritualistic music of Keiji Haino and Nijiumu this evening as part of the Driftworks boxset... Last week I found a seller on Discogs who was offering a NM (near-mint) copy of the Driftworks set, a 4CD collection of experimental soundscapes housed in a very stylish slipcase. Originally issued in 1997, good copies of the Driftworks set are increasingly hard to find, so I'm glad to report my copy which arrived today looks excellent (I've been picking it up all evening like some fetishistic objet d'art, the low-light pic I took doesn't do it any justice). Over 4 hours of music, with superb contributions from Thomas Köner, Pauline Oliveros, and Paul Schütze, but it's the Keiji Haino album that I keep returning to, I'm on my third pass as I type this. Like most Nijiumu recordings information is sketchy, save to say it's a live performance, probably from the early 90's, and sounds like an intersection between Toru Takemitsu's eerie score for Kwaidan, and the proto-Industrial music of Kluster. 9mins worth of the performance was included on the Isolationism compilation, which can be heard here. Worth bearing in mind that this music was most likely performed in the dark...