Still Thirsty

Akira Sakata & Nicolas Field

The story of this recording does not begin with this night. It stretches back nearly two decades—through stages, basements, long drives, and the quiet accumulation of trust that only time can build.

When Nicolas Field first contacted Akira Sakata and they played together for the first time, the encounter already carried the intensity of something older than itself. Their duo—alto saxophone, clarinet, voice, and drums—has since become a site of continuous transformation: not a fixed language, but an ongoing negotiation of listening, risk, and presence. Over the years, their music has remained raw and immediate, yet shaped by a deepening mutual awareness—each gesture both a rupture and a recognition.

Their earlier document, First Thirst, already hinted at something enduring: a dialogue capable of spanning generations, geographies, and histories.
Still Thirsty returns to this relationship—not as repetition, but as continuation. Time has passed, and with it, the world has shifted. Yet the music remains insistently alive, refusing closure. If First Thirst was about discovery, Still Thirsty is about persistence: the necessity of continuing to speak, to play, to listen.

Sakata’s presence carries more than sound. Emerging from post-war Japan, his decades-long trajectory through the avant-garde has always been inseparable from a broader political and social consciousness—an insistence on freedom not only in music, but in life. His playing, at once ferocious and vulnerable, resonates with histories of rupture and resistance. It is impossible not to hear, somewhere in its breath and cry, the long echo of a century marked by violence, displacement, and survival.

Those histories are not abstract. They cross generations and geographies. They include the memory of wars that reached far beyond their supposed fronts—into places, where lives were entangled in conflicts not of their choosing. These echoes remain, not as distant past, but as undercurrents that continue to shape the present music.

In this sense, Still Thirsty is also about proximity: about how two musicians, from different worlds, carry their histories into a shared sonic space. Improvisation becomes a way of holding these tensions without resolving them—of allowing contradictions to coexist, if only for the duration of a sound.

The recording presented here—captured in the charged environment of Cave12, a space dedicated to experimental and exploratory practices —is inseparable from that context. Places like this, sustained by collective effort and fragile infrastructures, make such encounters possible. They are not neutral stages, but active participants in the circulation of ideas, sounds, and bodies.

At a time when borders, both visible and invisible, continue to harden, these collaborations insist on another possibility: that sound can still travel where other forms of exchange falter.
It is within this spirit that the music takes shape: not as a simple gesture, but as an attempt to create lines of connection—between generations, and ways of listening.

Still Thirsty does not resolve anything. It does not offer comfort. Instead, it keeps something open—a space of encounter where intensity, fragility, memory, and resistance can coexist.
The thirst remains.

Crédits

Enregistré en direct au Cave12 le 7 avril 2019
Mixé chez KSL par Nicolas Field
Masterisé par Lasse Marhaug
Conception graphique : Alban Thomas, Alternative
Photos : Nicolas Field
Produit par Konnekt

Remerciements

Merci à tous ceux qui étaient présents, Marion, Sixto et Cave12 pour le son, l'enregistrement et leur soutien indéfectible. Ça a été une année difficile.