On a chilly Friday afternoon in December, trumpet player Toshinori Kondo reclines in the clutter of his Kawasaki recording studio, pours out two cups of shōchū liquor, and starts to explain what prompted him to abandon a lucrative career in Japan and move to Amsterdam in 1993.
"One thing is, I got f-cking bored with any music that was created in the last century — the 20th century," he says, in fluently coarse English. For Kondo, the once-thrilling momentum of popular music — from Delta blues to jazz to rock — had sputtered out: too much money, too many rehashes, too many songs about love. So he took his electric trumpet and box of effects pedals, broke up his band and wandered, quite literally, into the wilderness in search of "the next century's music."
In December 1993, Kondo headed to the Negev Desert in Israel with an NHK film crew and recorded a series of solo improvisations, al fresco. Using a language of slow, plangent tones and electrified trills, he attempted to start a dialogue with his surroundings — sometimes freaky, sometimes beautiful, sometimes a bit new age-y. It was the first volley in an ongoing project, titled "Blow the Earth," that has since taken him to locations such as Peru's Machu Picchu and the Ladakh Himalaya region in India.