afuma: songs from the shore

In Japanese folklore, Afuma indicates a time of day marked by spiritual or mysterious encounter. In Latin, one who inhales. Together as Afuma, Stefan Tcherepnin and Taketo Shimada breathe sepulchral energies into the brooding, cosmic fringes of guitar-based song vernacular. Tcherepnin's baritone and Shimada's lap steel guitar intertwine, smearing across world's-end horizons that propel Tcherepnin's ragged, foreboding vocal delivery and its lyrical portents of departure, of life's vessel unmoored onto a fathomless periphery. Shimada, a Tokyo-born musician and artist who has lived with Herbert Huncke and worked with Henry Flynt, also contributes Indian double-reed instrument shehnai to the band. And Stefan Tcherepnin, a contemporary artist and composer in fourth generation (continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin), embellishes their dirge-scapes with electronics from the Sonica, a lute shaped version of the Serge synthesizer developed by his uncle. A family friend and student of Maryanne Amacher, Tcherepnin's piano playing alongside Marianne Schroeder's additionally graced Blank Forms Edition's publication of Amacher's Petra. Tcherepnin and Shimada are joined by drummer David Silver for Songs From The Shore, their debut LP, featuring artwork in the form of "A Rip In The Void", a newly commissioned painting by Bobby Beausoleil.