Tomo Katsurada and Jonny Nash spent 2025 touring. Accompanying one another on acoustic and electric guitar. At the end of the year, over a 3-day period, the pair hit the studio to record what they’d learned and experienced. The resulting album, “At The Emerald Pool”, consequently has the feel of a diary. The 10 tracks flowing between polished pieces and looser, more Lo-Fi songs. Something like “Scent Of Limestone”, for example, is constructed from carefully crafted echoed, acoustic chiming and laidback electric licks. A conjoining of Americana and the cosmic. Eno & Lanois / Eno & Fripp-esque. Its delay-drenched vapour trails painting peaceful pictures of evening stars and deep, blue days. The titular number, sung by Nash with a Vini Reilly fragility, conversely, has the close-mic’d fog and fuzz of an intimate, bedroom 4-track ballad. 

Split equally between instrumental and pure, honest, vocal pieces; the music is an ethereal mix of reverb-rinsed strumming and picking, and layers of graceful space rock arcs. The combination emitting a harmonic haze of delicate new age-y drones, with the odd shot of psychedelic backward spinning. “Nagare Ni” contains the soft crackle of field recordings. Textures that could be the sound of a storm or shifting tides. “Black Leaf” boasts post-rock, alternate, Papa M, like tunings. The closing “Someday We’ll All Fall Down” has a slight `60s acid folk edge.* Katsurada’s whispered delivery recalling Masaki Batoh on Ghost’s “Temple Stone”, or Can’s Damo Suzuki. Nash the equivalent of Michio Kurihara or Michael Karoli. The song finishing the set with a spirit-lifting sense of catharsis.

“A duet of duelling guitars” might be a cool bit of alliteration, but each player’s contribution is far more sympathetic than that. Their seemingly improvised lines are supportive, complementary. Never showing off, or stealing the spotlight. It’s clear that one doesn’t wanna win without the other. 

*The first time I met Jonny, someone had spiked him. Dropped a trip in his drink. This was 20 years ago now, in Tokyo. 

Tomo Katsurada & Jonny Nash’s “At The Emerald Pool” can be ordered directly from Melody As Truth.