Tomo Katsurada & Jonny Nash / At The Emerald Pool / Melody As Truth

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…