Archeus "Spiral Code" LP

PRE-ORDER
Ships mid September

An'archives [An55] LP edition of 290, black vinyl, 2 color (blue & red) silkscreened jacket with obi (off white, tan, blue), insert and a postcard.

Spiral code is the second album released on An’archives by the Japanese trio
archeus, after 2023’s Kusōzu: Nine Death Stages, and their seventh release
altogether. It’s also the most staggering evidence yet of the single-minded pursuit of
group-sound explored by Keiko Higuchi (voice, drums, percussion, trombone),
Shizuo Uchida (4 strings), and TOMO (hurdy gurdy). For two tracks, “awakening,
beyond recurrence” and “where points and lines intersect”, they’re joined by Kiyotaka
Moriuchi, an improviser who’s played with the likes of Shoko Numao and Ensemble
Shippolly, on percussion and darbuka (a goblet-shaped drum played widely across
South East Asia).

Always able to scour magic from both their relationships with their instruments, and
their non-idiomatic interplay, on spiral code they’ve widened their net further; the
results oscillate from humid and claustrophobic blocks of noise to rivulets of tone
coursing across post-volcanic landscapes, and on into simple gestures suspended in
arctic space. Spiral code was recorded in a single day, on March 20 th 2025, at a
studio in Koenji, Tokyo, the morning session with the original trio, and afternoon and
evening session with Moriuchi – the first time archeus have played with a guest
musician.

When asked about the music archeus makes together, TOMO is quick to isolate the
singular characteristics of their collaboration: “we are trying to explore some new,
unknown musical vocabulary every time we play. And what we are trying to achieve
from every session is something unique, an interesting chemistry or, I should say,
alchemical reaction among the three of us.” You can certainly hear that alchemy in the
dynamic arc of their performances, the way they seem to be able to switch on a dime
and push the music into unexpected terrain, all while sounding intimately archeus.
“We have been playing for many years,” TOMO continues, “so I think that among
three of us, we can telepathically sense, feel and understand what each of us is
trying to express while we are playing.” It’s telling that guest musician Moriuchi fits so
effortlessly into the archeus soundworld, able to hitch a ride on the intimate
telepathy of Higuchi, Shizuo and TOMO; “I think he gave us some fresh air to our
music,” the latter smiles. But that telepathy extends, even, to the name of the album
itself, with all members pointing toward spiral imagery when naming the title track,
whether TOMO’s evocation of Kundalini serpent imagery and Caduceus, to the spiral
shape of DNA, what TOMO calls “the code of life.”

It’s certainly deeply entwined music: spiral code is a helix of sound, a cylindrical
coiling of possibility