Ayumi Ishito – Roboquarians, Vol. 2 (feat. Kevin Shea & George Draguns)

At its most sinister the new album by Ayumi Ishito may evoke a dystopia which is already creeping over the horizon, a seeping and bubbling satiny black ooze as people continue to go about their business, doing their weekly shopping and picking up their kids from school or walking the dog in some green-fringed park especially of the elevated variety, like the Coulée verte René-Dumont, High Line, Bloomingdale Trail or Seoullo 7017 as an army of drones with their prying cameras and officious manners swirl about overhead.

Perhaps it is only elaborating what already seems apparent, making plain our tangled morass as the era of mass surveillance which already infiltrates every inch of cyberspace hopes to spread out and permeate the metaverse. But on the second volume of Roboquarians the trio of Ishito with Kevin Shea and George Draguns are also playfully ebullient, so a fuzzier and friendlier comparison might summon a hyper-local battle for the future of our civilisation played out with foam blocks and mallets, or mecha of the anime and manga variety enjoying a hoedown beneath a blazing sunset.

Your interpretation of the record with its tilting balance of playfulness and menace might depend on your prevailing mood, but there’s no doubting the weirdness of Roboquarians, Vol. 2 which is free jazz at its most alien, sometimes with a kind of steampunk character as though the future of the form was being listened to through a transistor radio.

The first volume of Roboquarians arrived last March, but the record actually stemmed from a later session captured in September of 2022 when the trio chose to elaborate on their obvious chemistry as a unit. The second volume of Roboquarians has a longer and knottier backstory, as Shea and Draguns embarked on the project with a different ensemble in the spring of 2021, isolating their instruments from that session when the collaboration fell apart owing to artistic differences as the duo turned to Ishito seeking to salvage their work.

The endlessly creative saxophonist Ishito – whose early ensembles drew from indie and progressive rock as much as the avant-garde while exploring late night horror movie and science fiction aesthetics – already has plenty of form on 577 Records owing to her role in the Playfield and Open Question ensembles under the auspices of Daniel Carter, with Wondercult Club marking her quintet’s debut on the label while her two volumes with The Spacemen and the upcoming duo album Endless Season with Carter have embraced a more cosmic ambiance.

The guitarist Draguns meanwhile came up through the hardcore scene of the eighties while the prolific and versatile drummer Shea has oodles of experience playing alongside incendiary horns, as a longstanding member of Mostly Other People Do the Killing with Jon Irabagon and Peter Evans plus the bassist Moppa Elliott, while his other major project Talibam! has brought him into contact with such diverse figures as Daniel Carter, Alan Wilkinson, Tamio Shiraishi and Silke Eberhard as the duo of Shea and the keyboardist Matt Mottel style themselves as dadaist provocateurs.

Under the monicker People he recorded three albums with the guitarist Mary Halvorson, and several of his most recent projects have allied him with the saxophonist Stephen Gauci, while the relationship between Shea and Draguns stretches all the way back to the late nineties when they split the difference between free jazz and math rock on the first Storm & Stress album, a Don Caballero offshoot which was recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago.

Roboquarians, Vol. 1 winsomely described the new trio’s sound as ‘Black Flag jazz’, which immediately summoned up some of that band’s make-do punk ethos, their tempo shifts and screeching atonalism as Ishito offered up a curious blend of sci-fi textures through her tenor sax, plus marching band batteries and echoes of Americana all the while accompanied by Shea’s roiling and scattershot percussion and Draguns who wields a shapeshifting guitar.

With the saxophonist playing over the imprint of Shea and Draguns for what is now released as the trio’s second offering, the result is both freer and punkier as the drums sound especially spiky while Ishito who plays her tenor with effects ranges widely over the compositions, merging stupendously with the angular guitar lines of Draguns whether their dynamic plays out like a boisterous caper or an encompassing swarm. Bass lines are adopted interchangeably by the duo, while Shea cracks into his drums or sometimes strikes more deftly with the semblance of mallet percussion. At once a riposte to machine learning and a herald of the times, with Roboquarians, Vol. 2 in the first few days of January the trio of Ishito, Shea and Draguns have surely released one of the most bracing and magnetising records of 2025.