Canadian guitarist Ayal Senior appears to have found a second home in Tokyo. It might seem a curious destination, since he’s not hurting for chances to play at home. He regularly graces Toronto stages and has released a respectable shelf of recordings over the past couple decades that explore the intersection of Takoma-style picking and cosmic impulses. But in Tokyo, Senior has found company good enough to brave the city at its worst. Given the humidity, air pollution and torrential rainfalls, summer is when anyone who can afford to get out of Tokyo heads for the hills or the beach. But for the last two years, Senior has gone there in July to record encounters with fellow guitarists. In 2024, he made From 5pm To 5am with Jeff Fucillo (formerly of the Irving Klaw Trio), and the following year, he recorded Lost Hotel with Tetsu Mineta.
A streaming stroll through Mineta’s Bandcamp page is a worthwhile way to spend an hour, but it won’t get you very close to the record under consideration. It reveals him to be a crafter of playfully chopped and screwed beats. But on Lost Hotel, he and Senior conjure a mildly hallucinatory blues vibe that’s one part jet lag, another part heat, but mostly the sound of two men jointly staving off heavy-liddedness. The album’s seven improvised duos betray absolutely no hurry to achieve escape velocity, and the occasional wayward note affirms the late-night circumstances of its creation.
Senior and Mineta would rather orbit their common ground of steely shimmer and woody resonance, spinning yarns with mellow phrases, languid licks and spacy sound effects. “The Blues That Went Too Far” has some Delta eeriness to it, but it’s not bleak enough to be the work of men who sold their souls to the devil. (Senior’s credit-card holder is another matter; even in July, it’s not cheap to fly to Japan.) The melody of “Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief” implies regret, but the slippery traces of delay suggest that said thief will probably lift your wallet and pocket watch without you noticing even though he knows it’s bad for his karma. And the intertwined lines of “Natural Enemies” suggest not conflict, but interdependence, perhaps not unlike the bond between Senior and the like-minded collaborators who’ve lured him to Tokyo in its time of steam. [Medusa Editions]
—Bill Meyer
