Tomo Katsurada & Jonny Nash :: At the Emerald Pool

First, some context, because without it the record risks seeming simpler than it is. Tomo Katsurada spent a decade as the voice and guitar of Kikagaku Moyo, the Tokyo outfit that taught half of Europe what Eastern psychedelia could mean before dissolving and leaving a gap that has never truly been filled. Jonny Nash, meanwhile, is the man behind Melody As Truth, an Amsterdam label, and a third of Gaussian Curve alongside Gigi Masin — which is to say, someone who knows how to set the guitar aside too, when it's called for, and let the space itself do the playing.

The two have known each other for a decade, both live in Amsterdam, and At The Emerald Pool is born of a full year of performing together — churches, temples, concert halls, open-air festivals — before three days of recording fixed what the stage had already understood for some time: that their two guitars, more or less, had become a single voice.

The record opens with "Stained Light," a lullaby of arpeggios in which the dialogue is already complete from its first breath. It is instrumental, the first in a series that punctuates the album at regular intervals, and it is on these purely guitar-driven episodes — where effects, when called for, open textures that move like water stirred by an oar, not a motor — that the record builds its true architecture.

"Dwelling in a Cave" is its fullest instance: ambient guitar played on a lake's shore, a paper boat finding shelter in a hollow of rock — the echo of July Skies runs through the track while evading that same English pastoral melancholy that Antony Harding's project has made almost a signature. The melancholy is present here too, but drier, less English garden and more refuge.

"Know My Name" works the same threshold from another angle: a dreaming loop in which a delay-swathed guitar lets itself be caressed by another, in single notes, while the singing explores — always — the limen between what is perceived and what is real. It is no accident that the title asks for a name: on a record that entwines two guitar identities until they blur, knowing "my name" becomes the only question left standing.

"Sunshower Rite" is an altogether different light — solar refractions at the height of summer, that hour when the sun begins its descent and the rays no longer cut vertically but glance, oblique, and the eye is forced to follow the light passing through it rather than what the light illuminates. Instrumental again, still along the shores of that pastoral-ambient constellation of which Wayside & Woodland remains, in England, one of the most significant hubs — a genre the two musicians here cross as outsiders, carrying into it Katsurada's psychedelic ear and Nash's airier, almost Balearic hand.

Then comes "The Emerald Pool," the title track, sung. And here critical language can all but surrender: it is Seventies folk in its purest state, a Simon & Garfunkel filtered through ambient that — I say this without irony — we needed. The arrangement stops mattering the instant the melody touches that precise point of nostalgia which turns being out of time into an elegant virtue.

"Black Leaf" gathers what spring can give back, visually and olfactorily, in acoustic form: dandelions crumbling at the mere touch of air, a golden yellow married to a clear celestial blue, all of it reverbed until it loses its edges.

They let spring happen in the ear.

At The Emerald Pool is, by their own account, only the first chapter of a dialogue that will continue. But it is already, in itself, a small treatise on provisional dwelling: two guitarists who for a full year had no fixed home except in one another, and who now fix that temporary house into ten tracks before setting off again. Nothing more is needed, from where we stand, to recognise a record that belongs to us.