After We're Gone the Sun Still Shines
Nina Garcia, Flut, Jacob Sacks-Eivind Opsvik-Mat Maneri-Billy Mintz
Nina Garcia Puts Her Tools to New Use
Everything I’ve heard from the French guitarist Nina Garcia captures how she transforms her instrument into a noise generator, an intensely tactile machine transmitting sounds that are more visceral than they are loud—although they are definitely loud. She began making solo records as Mariachi, deftly repurposing some of the gnarly guitar sounds Thurston Moore unleashed in Sonic Youth. Although her playing contains other references, it’s hard to miss his language on Mariachi’s eponymous 2018 album, a seething, slashing blast of abrasion, feedback, and grind. I first heard Garcia last year on Knækket Smil (K-RAA-K), a duo album with trombonist Maria Bertel that violently elided any conventional sounds associated with either instrument. But Garcia’s first solo album under her own name, Bye Bye Bird (Ideologic Organ), feels like a breakthrough, an evolution involving much greater control of the chaos and the adoption of subtle structural underpinnings to make each noisy excursion feel closer to a composition than a furious act of sonic research.
The album opens with a surprising air of serenity on the title track, as Garcia plucks a series of warm, vibrato-laden notes that hang in the air with a patience absent in previous work, but it doesn’t take too long before the atmosphere veers toward something more febrile and complex. A melody line creeps in, recontextualizing those first tones as a wobbly foundation for the tender exploration, but as the piece unfolds the cycling sounds become more and more distorted and ominous, accelerating and gaining density, wiping away most hints of that lyric quality, only to pare the materials back to the same aura with which the piece opened. But I’m most impressed when Garcia uses sound as a sculptural material. There’s an appealingly hypnotic feel to “Le Leurre,” where a noisy, cycling pattern is endlessly subjected to subtle shifts. The guitarist restlessly alters the emphasis on different parts of the object, changes its tonal complexion, and removes and adds specific elements back in as its unspools into nothingness. Check it out below.
“Ballad des Souffles” spends 90 seconds positioning a pretty little phrase, voiced cleanly and without adornment, but just as we expect to radiate into a melodic marvel, it ends abruptly, leading right into “Pickup Tentative,” a churning in-the-red noise excursion that evokes her earlier music. For much of “Dans l’alios” the seething torpor is marked by microscopic fluctuations erupting from the din, something akin to the finely etched variations Angarad Davies scatters across the entirety of her masterpiece gwneud a gwneud eto, but by the end Garcia can’t help but ratchet up the noise and dispatch with the incremental shifts. The miniature “Aubé” offers a strange vulnerability with Garcia grappling with the unpredictable fury of feedback in the most delicate way possible. It’s a terrific record, but I’m more excited by what it portends in the future than what it delivers now. She rolls into Berlin this week to perform as part of an eclectic three-group bill with LA Timpa and Great Area at 90mil on Thursday, April 17.
Discovering Christopher Kunz
I’ve lived in Berlin for nearly six years now, but unraveling the dense local music community remains an ongoing process. Because of its depth it’s not unusual to still discover a musician who’s been active on the scene for years. I’ve definitely encountered Christopher Kunz’s name in the past, and I even possess a copy of Die Unwicht (ezz-thetics), his 2021 duo album with drummer Florian Fischer, that I hadn’t gotten around to hearing before I was struck earlier this year by Stones That I Have Chiseled (Aut) by the collective trio Flut. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing my best to catch up with his output. A couple of months ago the quartet Perplexities on Mars dropped its strong second album Forever Home (Bloomslang), a dense, multi-directional post-bop outing where the labyrinthine melodies once forged by Tim Berne and Chris Speed in Bloodcount are evoked, albeit with less density and more buoyant grooves. I’d never heard of the other band members—tenor saxophonist Max Hirth, double bassist Stephan Deller, and drummer Tom Friedrich—but they’ve developed a strong rapport, harnessing a bunch of moving parts in service of a singular musical vision. Kunz, who doubles on tenor and soprano—the latter with a clear admiration for Steve Lacy’s sound—and Hirth prove a formidable frontline, shaping lines in thick unison lines, hurtling lockstep patterns, and vibrant counterpoint before the band opens up for fiercely swinging improvisations. Across the album’s nine well-crafted tune the quartet deploys an impressive grasp of dynamics, its arrangements shifting to allow for tender solitude, hard-driving ebullience, and collective contemplativeness, suggesting that the group has spent a lot of time working out the details and achieving an almost telepathic connection. You can check out the expansive opening jam “Who Owns the Space,” below.
But I’m focusing on Flut because they perform at Sowieso on Thursday, April 17, where they’ll be joined for the second set by trumpeter Liz Allbee. Kunz has a long connection to bassist Isabel Rößler who is joined on the trio’s latest album by drummer Samuel Hall, and the fully improvised pieces that occupy Stones That I Have Chiseled reveal a group that has studied the sax trio literature of jazz, and moves easily between abstracted swing and deep explorations into collective soundmaking. Hall’s skipping yet jagged rhythm on the opening track “Driplines” sets the tone, with Kunz blowing see-saw like patterns—that inadvertently hint at “Pop Goes the Weasel”—over the beat, pushing the music in different directions at once, but the trio adroitly finds a common thread, harnessing a bit of spazzy chaos into an irresistible, spontaneous trip. You can hear it below.
The trio opts for pin-drop quietude on “Zuflucht für die ewig Suchenden,” which begins with hushed cymbal patter, lightly arco bass gestures, and an unpitched breaths, a tightrope walk of tiny movement that slowly accrues tonality, heft, and friction but resists falling to any sort of compositional patterns. Most of the six pieces on the vinyl edition of the album veer toward a wide-open sound that’s unmistakably rooted in jazz, but the two extended pieces only available on the digital download might be my favorite tracks. In the episodic “Bedeutungsknoten” a spindly assortment of clattery, hollowed-out noises vanishes for an extended tenor solo in the instrument’s upper range, a stream of knotted phrases, tart squeaks, and snake-like movement before moving into a trio section where the musicians conjure a trance-like balancing act from the most stripped-down materials, dispensing with any genre references in favor of pure sound. “There Is Silence and the Room Is not Filled with Stones That I Have Chiseled” is even more gloriously reduced, an extended exercise in weaving together small sounds as an illustration of close listening and heightened interactivity.
When Young Guns Morph Into Masters
Two decades ago pianist Jacob Sacks and bassist Eivind Opsvik had a conversation where they mused on which living jazz great they’d most like to play with. Both of those New York scene fixtures are artists of great sensitivity, subtlety, and restlessness, so it’s hardly surprising that they agreed upon drummer Paul Motian, one of the most original and important figures of the post-bop era. They embraced the idea and successfully enlisted Motian to join them and violist Mat Maneri to make the neglected classic Two Miles a Day, released in 2007. Maneri’s playing mirrored the drag in the drummer’s bumpy swing, setting up a beautiful context that delivered big dividends. The music was deliciously measured and melodic, with a whirl of internal tension and interplay giving the surface calm a thrilling electricity. The band played quite a few gigs in New York in the wake of the session, but the drummer’s death in 2011 spelled the end of the collaboration.
The three other musicians have continued to work together in shifting contexts. In fact, earlier this year Sacks and Maneri made peerless contributions to Synchronicity (Sunnyside), a marvelous album by Korean bassist Jeong Lim Yang with another exceptional drummer, Randy Peterson, whose playing shares some of the disruptive traits of Motian. Sacks, Opsvik, and Maneri decided to make another recording in the general mood of Two Miles a Day, enlisting an even more overlooked player to take the drum throne, Billy Mintz. A couple of weeks ago the band released the first fruits of the new partnership, the fantastic new Two Miles a Day, So Depending On (Yeah Yeah/Loyal Label), a rather awkward, inelegant collision of two phrases frequently used by Motian. Thankfully, nothing about the music feels as gawky as the album title. As one might expect from a drummer of Mintz’s experience, he doesn’t try to conjure Motian’s sound, although his own aesthetic tendencies aren’t radically different.
The album opens with a remarkable little gem by Sacks called “Drips and Drabs,” which is marked by a terse, darting melody of quicksilver feints and jabs voiced in unison by the pianist and Maneri, with the latter extending each tone to give the execution a wonderfully lopsided feel—in fact, they spend the whole tune engaging in a subtle push-and-pull, gently departing from the written line while constantly circling around its phrases in a way that stretches the theme like putty. Things get more jagged as the album proceeds. Opsvik’s fever dream “Cake, Cross, and Flowers” opens with piano chords that sound like they were swiped from Ellington’s “C Jam Blues,” and, indeed, the melody is one that the bassist has had swimming around in his head, originally inspired by a live Duke recording from the 1970s marked by “a bouncy beat with a syncopated horn riff.” He created a hypnotic countermelody to ride over the jagged groove, and Sacks takes a wonderfully rangy, off-kilter solo that both injects friction and allows us to hear how all of the parts fit together. The piece gains even more turbulence through Maneri’s wonderfully dark, slashing solo. Check out the tune below.
Other pieces are more direct, with less internal dissension, but the crafsmanshipt and heightened listening between the ensemble members couldn’t be more palpable. I’ve been on a pretty big Maneri jag of late, whether it’s the Yang album, his projects with Lucian Ban, or even his spoken word contributions to Nate Wooley’s superb Henry House project. He sounds better than ever, still perpetually rooted in the microtonalism he learned from his father Joe, but more versatile than ever. Sacks is a reserved figure who’s predilection for collective ensembles means that he’s only released a single album as a bandleader in two-and-a-half decades—the lovely Fishes (Clean Feed). Instrumentally, he’s the opposite of a showboat, always making choices that benefit the ensemble rather than unleashing improvisations that leech the listener’s attention. That said, he’s a marvelous, agile soloist, uncorking a bunch of killer statements here, but the way he interacts with Maneri or the rhythm section is no less impressive and satisfying. The album isn’t splashy and heralds no new trends, but the level of skill and interactivity offer a masterclass in what’s most salient and profound in improvised music in 2025. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard so far this year.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
April 16: Michelle Lou & Stefan Maier, electronics; Sarah Saviet, violin (Jack Sheen, Johann Paul von Westhoff, Oliver Leith and Sarah Saviet), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 16: Hervé Boghossian, acoustic guitar, voice; Kreis (Francesca Naibo and
Simone Massaron, electric guitars, objects, effects); Jessie Marino, violin, electronics, 8:30 PM, Theater im Kino, Rigaerstr.77, 10247 Berlin
April 17: LA Timpa; Great Area; Nina Garcia, 7 PM, 90mil, Holzmarktstr. 19-23, 10243 Berlin
April 17: Technical Reserve (T.J. Borden, cello, Hunter Brown, electronics, and Dominic Coles, electronics); Seiji Morimoto, objects, and Eric Wong, electronics; Bryan Eubanks, percussion, electronics, 8 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG
April 17: Flut (Christopher Kunz, saxophone, Isabel Rößler, double bass, and Samuel Hall, drums, percussion), with special guest Liz Allbee, trumpet, electronics, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 18: Stefan Maier, electronics; Michelle Lou, electronics, Technical Reserve (T.J. Borden, cello, Hunter Brown, computer, and Dominic Coles, computer), 8 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG
April 18: Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano, Matthias Bauer, double bass, and Joe Hertenstein, drums, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
April 19: Michaël Attias Trio (Michaël Attias, alto saxophone, Phil Donkin, double bass, and Devin Gray, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
April 21: Julian Lage Trio (Julian Lage, guitar, Jorge Roeder, double bass, and Joey Baron, drums), 8:30 PM, Metropol, Nollendorfpl. 5, 10777 Berlin