MOON IS THE OLDEST TV (LP)

SOLO (LP)

MOON IS THE OLDEST TV

MOSAISMIC

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’.

The ten songs join a female-voice-space with fluid beats and cleverly combine analogue and electronic sounds, patterns and lines. The music thus acquires a tender and at the same time indomitable female power.

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.