Her first inspiration was Charlotte Bienaime�'s 'Un podcast a' soi', which discusses fundamental questions of gender and feminism. "More often than not in history, 'Anonymous' was a woman"-this sentence by Virginia Woolf, epigraph to the famous radio podcast, has found an echo in Julie Campiche. Giving a voice to women, but in a distinct way: this is the common thread running through the album. Rather than a feminist manifesto, UNSPOKEN seeks to celebrate feminine strength, nourished by commitment and openness. She addresses the fragile balance of women in shadow and light of society. "Female strength is what makes the world go round. 80% of household chores are done by women for free and anonymously. I want to celebrate exceptional women, but also give a place to this everyday strength." Among the figures who inspire her and whose voices and actions she evokes are the Swiss artist and prostitute Grise�lidis Re�al, or Las Patronas, the Mexican guardian angels who throw food and water to those who have decided to migrate and illegally board freight trains bound for the USA.

KALI Trio's new album, The Playful Abstract, could be a soundtrack to the air we breathe. Repeated listens to this tranquil, ever-shifting and sometimes transcendent record also invoke an association with the Japanese term, Ukiyo, meaning the "floating world".�Nowadays ukiyo is seen as a state of mind emphasising living in the moment, detached from the difficulties of life.

KALI Trio's new album, The Playful Abstract, could be a soundtrack to the air we breathe. Repeated listens to this tranquil, ever-shifting and sometimes transcendent record also invoke an association with the Japanese term, Ukiyo, meaning the "floating world".�Nowadays ukiyo is seen as a state of mind emphasising living in the moment, detached from the difficulties of life.

A Certain Darkness Is Needed to See the Stars" (38:51 min.) is an energetic, minimal, polyrhythmic composition. It was played on a single prepared drum set (with aluminium foil), without any loops or overdubs. Time and form dissolve as loops and repetitions take hold. The piece expands and contracts. It changes texture while still maintaining a steady pulsating fluidity. The listener is forced to cede control and relax into it. You never know how long any given theme will stay the same, nor what will follow.

BASta! Is the solo project of double bass player and composer Joris Vanvinckenroye, in which he explores and pushes the limits of the double bass. In this project, using looping and effect pedals, Joris creates an almost orchestral sound, using the full range of his instrument-from the deepest basses to the highest notes. These layered compositions weave complex rhythms and melodies into a rich and compelling soundscape.

BASta! Is the solo project of double bass player and composer Joris Vanvinckenroye, in which he explores and pushes the limits of the double bass. In this project, using looping and effect pedals, Joris creates an almost orchestral sound, using the full range of his instrument - from the deepest basses to the highest notes. These layered compositions weave complex rhythms and melodies into a rich and compelling soundscape.

Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch’s group effort with Mobile establishes his concept of ritual groove music (or perhaps Zen funk) with this album. The sounds they convey are lean but not mean, spare beyond compare, very European, and unlike any of his contemporary groups, the Esbjorn Svensson Trio, or ECM groups in particular. The inventive drumming of Kaspar Rast provides supple support for Bartsch, Mats Eser’s marimba, and the bass clarinet or alto sax work of Don Li. There’s an airy, spacious, and cool Scandinavian feel to all of the pieces, dubbed “Moduls.” The development of “Modul 5” is lugubriously slow, almost ritualistic, and based on a one-note bass piano key vamp, while a mere three notes in a pseudo waltz with juxtaposed drum rhythms from Rast cement the most palpable distinct groove during “Modul 11.” Their most labyrinth and bottomless underground voicing is “Modul 4,” and while staying in that mode, “Modul 2” is extremely quiet and low-key, with a nominal understated advance that is hard even to discern. There’s a short free minimalist piece quite similar to Steve Reich and a concluding solo piano offering from Bartsch that further emphasizes space between notes being much more important and prevalent than the notes themselves. A tip-of-the-iceberg recording, in the figurative and literal sense, one can speculate this is a mere beginning, almost child’s play, for what Bartsch and his crew have in store for the future of his compelling and singularly original music.

SPIN is the 9th release of the working band RONIN since it's foundation in 2001. Since the last release AWASE (ECM 2018) the band has developed the repertoire continuously further. �SPIN shows the phase in which the band is now: looking back and forward at the same time. The RONIN rhythm culture based on pattern, cycle and groove developments and refined beats is still presented and combined with playfulness and the consciousness for freedom within the clear structures.

Sha’s Feckel has no interest in the jazz status quo. For its sophomore album Feckel for Lovers, the Swiss quartet has chosen to emphasize the rock element of its jazz-rock leanings, amping up the energy and crunch by several factor. The band is part of a new wave of Swiss acts stretching the boundaries of pattern-based, minimalist-inspired music deep into the expansive rock realm. It’s comprised of saxophonist Sha and drummer Kaspar Rast- both also part of Nik Bartsch’s Ronin- and guitarist Urs Mueller and bassist Sarah Zaugg. The group’s previous bassist Lionel Gafner performs on the album. “Feckel is about producing the most powerful, anarchic sound waves possible,” said Sha. “We explore all sorts of rhythmic structures that talk to your brain, as well as your body. We try to make uneven meters sound fluid so listeners can really feel immersed and connected to the music. It’s rough, tough, loud stuff, but has a positive energy which allows us to spread love to and through the audience.”

This is already the third album of the working band BLAER, founded in 2012 by the composer and pianist Maja Nydegger. YELLOW is the result of a longstanding and diligent collaboration. The band concept sets on a balanced group sound and a calm, focused flow of music. By this genuine attitude of a differentiated common ground, this album develops an urgency and power which in all coolness radiates warmth. Similarly to Schubert's music, where a minor tonality often contains a confident vibe, the seemingly simple, quiet and melancholic pieces of BLAER create a positive atmosphere. Surprising spins and grooves are subtly invigorating this atmosphere, yet always serving the overall dramaturgy. The leader Maja Nydegger thus offers her band a community-oriented, but crystal-clear concept in which her musical partners can all serve the whole while at the same time shining through individually with their high competence on their instruments. As a result, the lines of the reeds players (Nils Fischer and Claudio von Arx), together with the differentiated drum play of Philippe Ducommun, the often also ambient-like base of Simon Iten and the repetitive piano patterns and chord progressions of the composer herself create vast soundscapes and spherical hymns.

NIK BARTSCH'S RONIN LIVE

After several recordings on ECM, this is Nik Bärtsch's second studio album with minimal funk groovescapes on his own label Ronin. With the zen-funk quartet RONIN founded in 2001, Nik Baertsch proceeds with his together with Kaspar Rast (drums), Björn Meyer (bass) and Percussionist Andi Pupato. Their music consistently follows the same aesthetic vision under various instrumental guises: creating the maximum effect by minimal means. Despite the multiplicity of the band’s influences, Ronin’s music always possesses a strong individuality. They incorporate elements of disparate musical worlds, be they funk, new classical music or sounds from Japanese ritual music. However, these forms are never merely juxtaposed in a post-modernist fashion but instead amalgamated into a coherent new style. Ultimately, these sounds and rhythms are highly idiosyncratic. The music consists of very few phrases and motives, continually combined and layered in new ways. Ronin thus creates a consistent aesthetic across all levels of musical expression.

Repetition and variation are such exhausted compositional means; what "new" music could they still produce? The question may be asked by those who have not yet heard Nik Bärtsch's quartet. With piano; bass guitar; drums and percussion; they set the stage. First surprise: the jazz line-up plays funk. Second surprise: The funk is on the spot. They always play the same thing! One motif time after time after time... Third surprise: they don't always play the same thing; it does change; but only minimally... After a quarter of an hour; the thing has a name: Steve Reich meets James Brown.

The fourth album of working band BLAER, founded in 2013 by composer and pianist Maja Nydegger, is pure and essential - A „dive into calmness“. Since the last album, which attracted attention in the new jazz and ambient scene, the music developed into an even more original blend of different influences like ambient, minimal, spherical and independent music and contains even a pinch of movie scores.

Band leader, bassist and composer Jeremias Keller shows his quality as a creative multiinstrumentalist, arranger and contemporary indie producer on his new solo album ALLOY. Known as leader of his own band "Vertigo", as mastermind behind the home studio project "Lakota" and since 2020 as bassist of Nik Bärtsch's RONIN, he presents a concept album with a completely unique approach in his very own way of combining influences of post-rock, prog, jazz, electronica and indie pop

Is this a jazz record? Jazz musicians rarely play in such a disciplined; ego-less way. Minimal music? This music does not grow as processually and straightforwardly as Steve Reich's does. And you would look in vain for such expressive; individual nuances of timbre; articulation and timing in the ensembles of Reich or Glass. Jazz after all? If so; then a new; unfamiliar; reduced variant. The variant that the Zurich pianist Nik Bärtsch plays with his quartet "Mobile" he calls 'Ritual Groove Music’.

Plasma marks a major shift for the band—away from the sonically “immersive” and towards an almost tactile, physical quality of sound: the type that is associated with functional electronica. This is also Ikarus at their most affecting, playful, and fluent. The record, like that stuff lighting up a rural sky, is an energy. It’s something awe-inspiring, both familiar and alien. It’s also five instrumentalists who figured out how to maintain their individual voices while becoming one: a seamless, highly malleable substance.

LOOM is the second album by KALI Trio and shows the consequent development of the original style of the working band. The three Swiss musicians Nicolas Stocker (drums), Urs Müller (e-guitar) und Raphael Loher (piano) weave the various threads of their stylistic background together with relish and fresh skillfulness on their musical loom. The music, created jointly as an organism, is continuously charged in the four tracks and in the overall dramaturgy of the album. It unfolds its rhythmic pull and its mysterious atmosphere in a subtle and inexorable manner. LOOM consists of only four compositions, but clocks in at a few seconds short of the 45 minute mark! It's a beast in scope, but airy (literally) in feel, hence easy to inhale. Each piece plays like the equivalent of a time-lapse of a looming cloud formation a liquid progression of shifting shapes, changing density as well as shadow and light play. By the virtue of working with subtle iterations of form and using extended swaths of time as the equivalent of a large-scale canvas, the material evokes the mechanics of trance music. The creative use of sound design and general choice of spartan aesthetics, albeit executed using acoustic instruments, emphasize styles club-inclined and tasteful. The overall effect is cinematic and mesmeric; a sonic documentation of a daydream unraveling.