Ruins Alone & Sabot

The cultural association Offset takes on the task of organizing a series of concerts in the venues of the renovated Teatro Sì in Bologna. For the occasion, the special guest is Tatsuya Yoshida of the legendary Ruins, who returns to Italy yet again to present his new solo project under the name Ruins Alone.

First, opening the evening, is the San Francisco-based duo Sabot, made up of Chris Rankin on bass and Hilary Binder on drums. They ignite a spark of a kind rarely seen these days. With sheer instrumental mastery and a positive, devastating attitude, the duo stages a short, blistering set in which they stoically pick apart that sound which acts like Don Caballero and co. developed and wrung dry beyond belief just over a decade ago. Sabot have been following that math-noise trail for a long time, and they do it with quite respectable grace, without ever overdoing it. Rankin's bass is practically dissected surgically as if it were a guitar spewing out riffs nonstop, like a body forced to vomit up all its unease in the form of notes held back with duct tape. Meanwhile the drumming of the wiry Binder shapes the muscular sonic architecture with a series of tried-and-tested, precise acrobatics, never losing the desire to entertain and be entertained.

In short, a set with no great pretensions, short and honest. This odd pair certainly doesn't reinvent anything, but we have to note that they do it with considerable class.

After a break punctuated by unforeseen and tedious technical problems, and with Yoshida's face saying it all — at one point we almost think he's about to abandon the performance altogether — we watch the set of this brilliant multi-instrumentalist, who has built up a cult following partly thanks to the numerous prestigious collaborations he's struck up around the world — his work with John Zorn being a prime example. In roughly half an hour of performance we find ourselves facing an endless, dazzling blend made up of astonishing jazz flourishes, literally classic-oriented pantomime, and nods to a certain assault-rock always with a sturdy Zorn-like stamp, all wrapped up in a wild game of quotation, always joyful and never out of focus.

Yoshida obviously does everything himself, with the drums front and center, and a multi-effect pad played and abused as needed, which incessantly spits out sampled sounds of every kind. Amid neurotic, cartoonish sonic assaults, ambiguous hard-prog references of the kind only certain mad Japanese musicians know how to evoke, and so on, an intense, multifaceted set closes as if it were nothing.

With his usual, almost effortless class, and a fair, still-intact dose of performing madness, the former (?) Ruins member leaves us and, with his Zen calm, wanders around the small venue like just another bystander. The audience, decidedly small but attentive, thanks him and says goodbye.

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