Psychogeography, an Improvisational Derive

“Psychogeography, An Improvisational Derive” documents a singular meeting within São Paulo's vibrant improvisation scene — a convergence of four musicians whose practices stretch far beyond conventional instrumentation, and whose collaboration reveals a sonic landscape as unpredictable and alive as the city itself. Recorded live at Red Bull Studios during Improfest 4/2017 — the Festival Internacional de Improvisação e Arte Sonora — the performance brings together Brazilian experimentalists Antonio "Panda" Gianfratti, Marco Scarassatti, and Paulo Hartmann with the legendary Japanese improviser Otomo Yoshihide, whose presence, backed by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, helped open institutional doors for a music that typically thrives far from mainstream visibility.

The quartet's instrumentation alone signals the scope of the encounter. Gianfratti's contemporary percussion and drums provide a shifting, textural foundation — sometimes pulse, sometimes pure sound. Scarassatti's viola-de-cocho and self-built instruments (Kraiser, PássaroCocho, Tromp Kirk Roland) introduce a vocabulary rooted in Brazilian folk tradition but radically reimagined through experimental technique. Hartmann's prepared third-bridge guitar, fretless Chiquita, and "Gambelão" extend the string palette into metallic resonance, friction, and unstable harmonics. Yoshihide, alternating between electric guitar, bass, and turntables, threads noise, gesture, and fractured melody into the ensemble with the authority of someone who has spent decades redefining the boundaries of improvised music.

What emerges across the album's six tracks is a music of progressive discovery — a kind of sonic cartography made literal in the track titles themselves, each one a set of GPS coordinates rather than a name. It's a small but pointed gesture toward the Situationist dérive the subtitle names: no fixed destinations, only positions logged along the drift. Strings are plucked, scraped, bowed, struck, and coaxed into timbres that feel both handmade and otherworldly. Percussion appears not as rhythmic punctuation but as a sculptural element. Turntables blur the line between instrument and environment. The result is a vibrational world built from bricolage, where sound takes precedence over genre, and where musicality arises not from familiar structures but from the sheer vitality of interaction.

The album's title proves apt: this is geography understood as mental and emotional terrain. Each track feels like a walk through an unfamiliar district — sudden openings, tight corridors, unexpected collisions of texture and color. The quartet's interplay is marked by a deep sensitivity to space: moments of density give way to near-silence; eruptions dissolve into delicate filigree; individual voices emerge only to be absorbed again into the collective fabric. Despite the heterodox instrumentation, the group never sounds scattered. Their listening is acute, their responses immediate, their sense of shared direction unmistakable.

In the broader context of Not Two's catalog, Psychogeography stands as a testament to the label's commitment to documenting improvisation at its most exploratory. It captures a meeting between São Paulo's most distinctive experimental voices and one of Japan's most influential improvisers — a cross-continental exchange that feels organic, necessary, and utterly alive. The music is raw, inventive, and deeply rooted in the physicality of sound, yet it carries an unmistakable poetic charge.

A document of four artists mapping an imaginary terrain in real time, Psychogeography is both a celebration of São Paulo's improvisational singularity and a reminder that the most compelling music often emerges at the edges — where tradition, invention, and risk converge.