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.

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.