Throughout the 21st century so far, the brilliant Japanese piano one-off Satoko Fujii has been prolific, creatively consistent, and fearless - a participant or leader on over 60 albums in 15 years on the Libra Records imprint she runs with her trumpeter husband Natsuki Tamura, in settings from solo improv performance to leading international orchestras. When the lockdowns came, Fujii was in her 61st year, but the threat to participatory music-making seemed only to fuel a redoubling of her efforts, as eight releases in 2020, 2021's Moon On The Lake and now these two new releases confirm. Mosaic, made with her This Is It! trio with Tamura and percussionist Takashi Itani, is a byzantine delight of rhythmically restless figures (sometimes distantly reminiscent of Tim Berne's music), squabbling free-ensemble tumults, brittle plucked-and-struck improv dialogues, and tonally fertile percussion meditations explored across five long tracks. Underground - a duo with remarkable vibraphonist and marimba player Taiko Saito - is a contrasting short-track confection of ambient hums, glowingly pulsating explorations of timbre and tone-colour, scurrying rhythm-games, and imaginative conversation between two quite different performers who can think uncannily alike.

For Mosaic, Fujii and trumpeter Tamura found workarounds for the time-lapses that hamper internet live music, to get comfortable with Tokyo drummer Takashi Itani 400 miles away from the pair's home in Kobe. For Underground, mallets-player Taiko Saito was in Berlin, but she and Fujii resourcefully juggled composed parts, improvisations, overdubs and sound files sent back and forth, to create the vividly intimate parallel world that they should have been sharing onstage on a European tour at the time. In the liner notes to Underground, Satoko Fujii firmly dismisses objections that such remote methods can't produce 'true music'. “Music is 200 per cent open to any approach you take to it,” she writes. “It is real, free art ”. This unique creator's all-embracing notions of what music can be have been testifying to that for decades.