Maybe half a dozen times I played „Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter“ by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra in my radio nights running three decades, and only now found out with more than half-conscious vagueness that it was the irresistible adaptation of an African template, and with the good old mbira it is now also brought to new life, on the first work by Midori Takada in decades. Midori Takada did well never to follow the ridiculous superiority thinking of the Wiener Schule of classical music, and discovered early on the multiverse of a single drum, and like Cage, she found that a single perfect note on the shakuhachi could sometimes exude more magic than some of the high-flying, form-obsessed Western orchestral music of past centuries. The spellbinding art of elementary textures, and btw, fantastic covert art. Here we are seduced (again) by this female magician who lets us fall deeper and deeper into an ancient African folk tune. „Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter“ is such a terrific perfomance, that starts with strangeness and moves forward to the dance of life that life can be.