Manuel Knapp (from Austria) + Keiko Higuchi

When it comes to chilly subterranean lullabies, Manuel Knapp has a penchant for keeping the children nice and cold at night. Known in his native Austria for his jagged, crepuscular visual work, he has been busy with a plethora of sumptuous sound-based collaborations during his short stay in Japan.

In addition to the likes of Astro (Hiroshi Hasegawa), Government Alpha and Zbigniew Karkowski, he has recently been matching his dense electronic explorations with the delicious vocal tumult of Higuchi Keiko, a globetrotting voice artist and musician whose own work covers the worlds of jazz, free improvisation and some very lovely noise in-between.

This heady collaboration will no doubt emancipate a magical onslaught of surreal and sublime frequencies.

Manuel Knapp

Higuchi Keiko

Nobunaga Ken + Tabata Mitsuru + Murata Naoya

An outrageously heavy trio in their inaugural full-scale blowout, Nobunaga Ken (drums, from Hisspiss, Tetragrammaton, etc.), Tabata Mitsuru (guitar, from AMT, Zeni Geva, etc.) and Murata Naoya (turntables) are braced and ready for a near-perfect mindmeld of over-amplified brilliance.

Get set for an omniverse of spine-tingling metallurgy, intergalactic chemical compounds, and other scientific improbabilities that will leave you begging for the spacesuit you never knew you wanted.

Nobunaga Ken

Tabata Mitsuru

Murata Naoya

Masatsugu Hattori + DeAthAnovA (drum duo)

With a firm grasp of jazz tradition, drummer and vibraphonist Masatsugu Hattori took his percussion work straight into the new millennium with a range of genre-defying projects, including electroacoustic unit Ryusenkei Body, jazz-electronica unit Zycos, and the conceptual electronica of Aktion Directe. These days he has taken a minimal musical approach while focusing on solo and collaborative work.

As such, he'll be going metal-to-metal with DeAthAnovA (aka Yoichiro Shin), another protean drummer who keeps his playing schedule jam-packed with a number of ear-melting projects, such as Optrum (with Atsuhiro Ito), Plugdead (with Naoki Nomoto) and Destorio (with Naoki Murakami and Jin Harada). Stand back and let this titanic duo fulfill all of your cyclopean rhythm fantasies.

Masatsugu Hattori

DeAthAnovA

Evil Penguin

Master of disguises, Mexican top-hats, ambient rockabilly to minimal Hawaiian Kumulipo chants, the Evil Penguin poses the primordial question of evanescence against a backdrop of New Wave folk. Celebratory, subliminal, moment-to-moment. A Tasmanian treasure with a penchant for open spaces.