posted by Ben Hogwood, with the majority of text from the album’s Bandcamp page.

Curving Time is what happens when two musicians spend over a decade circling the same question from opposite directions, and finally sit down to answer it together.

Takeshi Nishimoto and Hiroshi Watanabe have individually spent more than twenty years exploring the emotional reach of instrumental music – one through guitar, sarod, and acoustic composition, the other through synthesizers and electronic production. This, their first collaborative release, unites these parallel journeys revealing a musical language where neither electronics nor acoustic instruments take center stage.

It is a sinuous, luminous album which is wholly its own, full of clarity and space where celestial shards illuminate and delight, lingering long after the last note dies away, with each player becoming equal voices in a deeply atmospheric conversation that feels both inevitable and entirely new.

The first track to be made available from the album, Empty Park, is an easy listen, the clarity of the guitar lines coming through against a background of soft reverb. The lines have a languid quality, the music improvised in its own sweet time.

Takeshi Nishimoto is a Japanese guitarist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator whose work spans contemporary classical, ambient, electronic, and cross-cultural music. Classically trained at the University of Southern California, he has developed a distinctive musical voice shaped by European classical traditions, North Indian classical music, jazz, and minimalist composition. He has collaborated with artists including John Tejada, Burnt Friedman, Robert Lippok, and Mike Shannon.

Hiroshi Watanabe is a Tokyo-born electronic music producer and DJ renowned for his deeply emotional, melodic techno and ambient soundscapes. After studying synthesizers at Berklee College of Music and navigating the New York underground, he returned to Japan to forge a distinct sonic identity, with releases under various aliases via Kompakt, Derrick May’s Transmat Records, and more recently InFiné.

Curving Time will be released on Friday 6 November on Lo Recordings.

Published post no.3,020 – Friday 18 September 2026