For anyone who first discovered Keiji Haino through Japanese imports in the 1990s, before the internet made every obscurity searchable, his records could feel less like commercial releases than evidence. The black clothing, sheets of hair, unfamiliar Japanese lettering and almost complete absence of ordinary biographical information allowed the imagination to expand around the sound. A Haino recording purchased from a store such as Amoeba was not simply another album entering the collection. It was an aperture cut into a musical civilization whose dimensions remained unknown. Tima Formosa preserves some of that old mystery even though its facts are now available. Three major figures meet in a modern performing-arts center, but the result sounds as though no institution, genre or recognizable century was present to supervise them.
Recorded on January 8, 2009 at the Playhouse in the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center, Tima Formosa was the first performance by Oren Ambarchi, Jim O’Rourke and Keiji Haino as a trio. That word “first” becomes astonishing in retrospect. What might have remained a single electroacoustic encounter instead became the seed of one of experimental music’s most durable groups, eventually producing a long sequence of annual performances and releases. Yet the band listeners would later recognize is almost absent here. Haino does not command the center with electric guitar, O’Rourke does not anchor the music with six-string bass, and Ambarchi is not seated behind a drum kit. Ambarchi plays guitar, O’Rourke works at the piano, and Haino uses voice, flute, drum machine and electronics. Tima Formosa is therefore the trio’s prenatal form: all of its genetic information is present, but its future body has not yet decided what shape to take.
The title provides the first hidden doorway. Tima formosa is also the scientific name of a marine hydrozoan, commonly called the small fringed jelly. I found no statement confirming that the biological reference was the musicians’ intended meaning, but the correspondence is almost suspiciously exact. A jellyfish has no skeleton to dictate its form. It is translucent, radially organized and propelled by repeated contractions, receiving information through a distributed nerve net rather than a centralized brain. That is remarkably close to how this improvisation behaves. No instrument becomes its permanent spine, no musician functions as an obvious leader, and the music advances through collective pulsation rather than a fixed beat. Sounds appear through one another as though the entire performance were a transparent organism whose internal currents remain visible.
“Tima Formosa 1” lasts almost twenty-five minutes and establishes this skeletal absence immediately. Ambarchi’s guitar is stripped of the social behavior normally expected from a guitar. It does not introduce a progression, establish a riff or demand recognition through virtuosity. Instead, it produces low pressure, hovering electrical depth and tones whose edges have been dissolved. O’Rourke enters the piano from the wrong side, treating its interior as a field of strings, surfaces, resonance and feedback rather than a keyboard designed to deliver notes. Haino moves around and above them, his voice appearing not as narration but as another unstable acoustic material. He can sound wounded, ceremonial, threatening and tender before language has a chance to determine which emotion is correct.
Black Truffle’s original description calls O’Rourke’s interventions “Tudor-esque,” a comparison that contains an entire underground history. David Tudor began as the extraordinary pianist entrusted with some of the most demanding postwar compositions by John Cage and others, then gradually transformed the piano and electronic equipment into unpredictable systems of feedback. In Tudor’s realization of Cage’s Variations II, microphones, contact pickups, springs and objects turned the amplified piano into something more electronic and orchestral than pianistic. O’Rourke’s role on Tima Formosa belongs to this lineage. He is not merely preparing the piano to produce novel percussion. He makes it behave like an electrical ecology, a large resonant animal responding to pressure from the guitar, the room and Haino’s electronics.
That connection also helps explain why the album never feels like three soloists politely taking turns. Each musician alters the conditions under which the others are heard. Ambarchi’s low guitar frequencies change the apparent size of O’Rourke’s piano. O’Rourke’s scraped and resonant attacks make Haino’s electronics seem embedded in the instrument’s wooden body. Haino’s voice changes everything around it from abstract sound into psychological space, then withdraws before that interpretation can harden. The trio does not simply contribute separate sounds to a common pile. Each musician continuously changes the meaning, distance and physical temperature of the other two.
The brief “Tima Formosa 2” occupies only three minutes and forty-four seconds between two enormous structures. It could be mistaken for an interlude, but it functions more like the narrow middle of an hourglass. O’Rourke allows recognizable piano tones to collect beneath Haino’s voice while Ambarchi sustains the surrounding atmosphere. After the first piece’s uncertain machinery, the presence of something almost melodic feels startlingly intimate. The effect demonstrates one of Haino’s most unusual powers. His extreme reputation is often built around volume, shrieks and overloaded guitar, but his voice does not require violence to become intense. Even at reduced scale, he seems to sing from somewhere beyond performance, as though the act of producing a tone were being discovered and endangered at the same moment.
“Tima Formosa 3” stretches beyond thirty-one minutes and slowly reveals the trio’s future obsession with rhythm. Haino’s drum machine does not settle the performance into conventional time. Its impacts resemble signals transmitted into an environment that may or may not answer. Ambarchi’s guitar produces mass without behaving like accompaniment, while O’Rourke alternately deepens and fractures the available space. Haino eventually exchanges the direct human exposure of his voice for flute and electronics, but the transformation does not reduce his presence. The flute becomes breath separated from language, another way for the body to enter the circuit without explaining itself.
The use of a drum machine by Haino is especially significant. Electronic rhythm in his hands is rarely a convenience or a substitute for a drummer. He often plays machines physically and intuitively, treating repetition as something that can be forced, interrupted and spiritually questioned. On Tima Formosa, those pulses suggest a heart being constructed while the organism is already alive. The trio does not follow the beat so much as examine its consequences. Every strike asks whether the surrounding sounds will gather into a body or continue floating independently.
A year after the Kitakyushu performance, the musicians met again at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe and reversed their instrumental identities. Ambarchi moved to drums, O’Rourke to bass, and Haino to guitar, voice, electronics and lap steel. That January 24, 2010 concert was announced as a Tima Formosa launch and later released as In a Flash Everything Comes Together as One There Is No Need for a Subject. The historical hinge is beautiful: the performance celebrating the trio’s first recording became the source of its second. At the moment one document entered the world, the musicians were already destroying its instrumental arrangement and creating the next one.
The contrast between those first two albums reveals that this trio was never founded upon a particular sound. Its real instrument is the relationship among the three players. On Tima Formosa, they make electroacoustic music from guitar, piano, voice and electronics. One year later, they become an impossible power trio. In subsequent performances they would introduce flute, toy piano, synthesizers, kantele, twelve-string acoustic guitar, wine glasses, suona, oboe, electronics and Haino’s homemade “Strings of Dubious Reputation.” The continuity lies not in equipment but in their shared refusal to let an instrument retain one stable identity.
This also makes Tima Formosa foundational to Black Truffle itself. Issued as the label’s fourth release and co-released with the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, it arrived when Black Truffle was still a small vessel for Ambarchi’s immediate musical universe. The trio subsequently became one of the label’s central recurring ensembles, eventually generating twelve releases and tracing a performance history across more than a decade. Black Truffle did not merely document an established group. It preserved the first cellular division of a group that did not yet know it would continue.
Stephen O’Malley’s package design adds another quiet circuit to the object. O’Malley’s work with Sunn O))) helped create a visual and musical language in which extreme metal, drone, ritual, modern composition and underground publishing could occupy the same darkness. Ambarchi had already moved through those overlapping worlds, while Haino had spent decades making the borders among psychedelic rock, free improvisation, noise and spiritual practice nearly useless. The sleeve therefore does more than make the CD attractive. It places the music inside a larger network where an experimental piano trio, a Japanese psychedelic outsider and the aesthetics of underground metal can recognize one another without becoming the same thing.
The album’s three-part proportions even resemble an organism observed at different scales: twenty-five minutes of formation, less than four minutes of exposed interior, then thirty-one minutes of altered return. It breathes outward, contracts to a fragile center, and expands again with new rhythmic organs. There are no descriptive track titles to tell the listener what to imagine, only the same biological-sounding name numbered three times. The absence of verbal direction protects the music from being reduced to a story. We are left with behavior, texture, pressure and transformation.
Tima Formosa is not the sound of three masters displaying what made them individually famous. It is the rarer sound of three developed identities agreeing to become temporarily unrecognizable. Ambarchi turns the guitar into depth, O’Rourke turns the piano into circuitry, and Haino turns the human body into voice, breath, pulse and electrical disturbance. Together they create something translucent but not weightless, formless but not random, delicate enough to resemble a marine animal and powerful enough to establish a band that would still be mutating more than a decade later.
For listeners who once encountered Haino as a mysterious figure inside imported records, Tima Formosa does not destroy that mystery by making the history knowable. It reveals that mystery was never simply the result of missing information. The deeper mystery is what these musicians do even after every date, instrument and location has been identified. The gauges are visible. The components are labeled. The signal is still coming from somewhere we cannot name.
Review by ChatGPT for Private Release
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