This is Roger McDonald, co-founder and deputy director of Arts Initiative Tokyo, describing the city:
This sense of physical impermanence makes Tokyo something like a huge, ever-evolving John Cage composition, whirling itself through chance procedures and the interventions of its inhabitants/users.
That’s from McDonald’s essay “A Huge, Ever-Growing, Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Empty Center of a City Called Tokyo,” from the recently published book Art Space Tokyo: An Intimate Guide to the Tokyo Art World, an excellent window on the city’s art scenes as expressed through interviews with curators, artists, and other cultural figures, as well as essays and neighborhood maps.
More information at chinmusicpress.com and artspacetokyo.com. Visit McDonald’s Arts Initiative Tokyo at a-i-t.net.
If there’s a musician today who best builds on the Zen folk of John Fahey, it’s James Blackshaw, whose cycling finger-picking and modal zone-outs bring to mind Fahey’s philosophically inspired work. Brethren of the Free Spirit is not the name of some rogue sect from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, though its music could suit one of that novel’s mathic convents. The Brethren is Blackshaw functioning side by side with outward bound lutist Jozef Van Wissem, who plays his instrument as if it were an occidental sitar. Heard on their recent The Wolf Also Shall Dwell With the Lamb (Important) full length, they collaborate like some intricate device spinning in slow motion, effervescent lines forming meditative patterns that seduce through hypnotism. At times (check out “Into the Dust of the Earth,” a free download from the label’s website: 
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The brittle little twitches that flicker through “Mineral Hall” sound like some mischievous Morse code, some deeply buried message struggling to make itself heard, breaking out in little cracks in the otherwise startling haze (