ProStudioMasters.com

"... the magical ingredient here is Nakagawa ... Willemark’s singing, set against the koto, underpinned by the rich melodicism and impeccable time of Jormin is a beguiling experience to put it mildly. The trio ebbs and flows, breathes and sighs, weaves in and out with a grace and energy as natural as the sea on the shore or the wind in the trees ... how deeply beautiful this music is: visceral, physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, sensual, historical and geographical. A gorgeous album." - TheJazzBreakfast.com This Swedish-Japanese project from bassist Anders Jormin spotlights the highly distinctive voice and string playing of Lena Willemark and introduces koto player Karin Nakagawa. In this trio music, the Japanese classical tradition and the stark, archaic sounds of the koto, allied to Jormin’s powerful and subtle bass playing, form a unique context for Willemark’s sung poems, delivered in her native Älvdals dialect. A shared wish to take the music into “unexplored regions” prompted Jormin to write to Nakagawa, the koto virtuoso he had seen in concert years before, to propose this new trio. Nakagawa revealed some of the mysteries of the 1000-year-old koto tradition, while Willemark taught Nakagawa how to play Swedish polska. "Both Lena and I felt this would be a challenging project with exciting and unpredictable potential ... the history became about me learning the functions and possibilities of composing for koto. Lena wrote a series of poems that I set to music, then we had Karin fly over from Japan to meet us for a first week of playing together." - Anders Jormin