A solo guitar record from 1975 that dismantles the very idea of what a guitar can do. Masayuki Takayanagi's April is the Cruellest Month is a cornerstone of Japanese free improvisation — a high-wire act of acoustic violence and meditative calm that remains as confrontational today as it was fifty years ago. Listen with headphones or don't listen at all.
There is a photograph of Masayuki Takayanagi from 1975. He sits cross-legged on a tatami mat, a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster in his lap. His face is unreadable. The studio is bare except for a single microphone and a reel-to-reel machine. This is the image that accompanies April is the Cruellest Month, and it tells you everything you need to know about what follows.
Takayanagi recorded this album in a single take at the old Toshiba-EMI studio in Tokyo. Engineer Kenji Sano ran the tape at a deliberately slow speed to catch every last resonance. There are no overdubs. No edits. Just one man, one guitar, and forty minutes of music that sounds like a building collapsing in slow motion.
The Preparations
The Gibson ES-5 you see in that photograph is not a normal guitar. Takayanagi had prepared it with extra strings, screws, and small pieces of metal wedged between the frets. He had filed the bridge to create buzzing. He had wrapped a chain around the headstock. The instrument became a percussion device, a wind chime, a mechanical malfunction.
He called his approach “gradual improvisation.” Not about flash. Not about speed. About duration and decay. Each sound is allowed to bloom and rot at its own pace. The album’s two tracks — Part I and Part II — are arcs of tension that rise and fall like a fever chart.
The Sound
Listen to how the first track begins. A single scrape across the low strings, held for what feels like a minute. Then the sound of metal on metal — is that a pick? A screwdriver? Takayanagi used standard picks, but also cello bows and drumsticks. At certain points, the guitar howls with feedback that he controls with his body position.
The album was released on ALM Records, a small label run by a record store owner in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. It sold maybe two hundred copies in its first year. It has never gone out of print.
The second track is quieter. More air between the notes. You can hear him breathing. At one point, a telephone rings in the distance — someone at the studio, forgotten in the moment. Takayanagi pauses for exactly three seconds, then continues. The tape did not stop.
That telephone ring is not on any official track listing. It is just there. A ghost in the machine.
There is no lesson here. No tidy conclusion. Only the sound of a man sitting in a room with a prepared guitar, making choices that cannot be taken back. The album ends not with a climax but with a fade — the tape runs out, the music stops mid-gesture, and you are left alone in your own listening space, wondering where the next note was going.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Recorded in a single take at old Toshiba-EMI studio.
- Guitar prepared with extra strings, screws, and metal wedges.
- Used cello bows and drumsticks alongside standard picks.
- A telephone rings during the second track.
- Engineer Kenji Sano ran tape at slow speed for resonance.
What does the title refer to?
It is a line from T.S. Eliot's *The Waste Land*, reflecting Takayanagi's interest in modernist literature. The album uses the epigraph to suggest a mood of desolation and fractured rebirth.
How does this compare to other free guitar albums of the era?
Unlike Derek Bailey's pointillist abstraction or Sonny Sharrock's screaming sustain, Takayanagi treats the guitar as a percussion instrument and a source of extreme acoustic phenomena — scraping, tapping, prepared sounds, and minute feedback control.
Is this album challenging to listen to?
Yes, but rewarding. It demands patience and an openness to non-musical sounds. Heard through good headphones, the micro-details of string noise and feedback are astonishingly vivid — that telephone ring is a permanent surprise.