Back in a Relatively Sane Land

Sophie Agnel & Joke Lanz, Jules Reidy, Craig Taborn & Peter Evans, Silke Eberhard & Céline Voccia,

Some friends have candidly revealed that the lengthy of these weekly missives prevents them from getting through Nowhere Street each week. I’m not going to apologize, as I consider this platform a corrective to the bite-sized style of music criticism that seems to have become the standard format, but I will say this week’s edition ought to please those complainers. I got back from a two-week trip to the US last Wednesday, catching a nasty cold on my final day in Chicago where I had a blast presenting the ninth edition of Frequency Festival. Despite the daily degradations visited upon the world by the current US administration—which generated an unparalleled sense of revulsion with its appalling kneecapping of Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday—there are countless citizens who don’t subscribe to the presiding state of affairs over there. There was a ton of great music and it was deeply satisfying to bring together a diverse group of artists who either began or strengthened friendships across the week. But the experience knocked me out and certainly impacted my immunity. Jet lag, a backlog of work, and a bad cold aren’t good for productivity, and I’m only starting to feel okay today. So this week’s edition, while previewing a good number of Berlin shows this week, is on the short-and-sweet tip. Next week I’ll be back to the usual nonsense. Thanks for sticking with me.

Sophie Agnel, Always Great, Never the Same, Returns to Berlin

Last fall I admitted that I had only come to appreciate the multifarious talents of French pianist Sophie Agnel rather late in the game. I ran down a few of her recent recordings at the time, when she was visiting Berlin in November to play with Chicago percussionist Michael Zerang. I heard her play in late January at Pierre Boulez Saal as part of an intriguing ensemble put together by Chicago cornetist Ben LaMar Gay—alongside Sam Pluta on electronics, Mikel Patrik Avery on drums, Macie Stewart on violin and voice, Olula Negre on cello and voice, and Pascal Niggenkemper on double bass—where she played a masterful support role, toggling between sleek post-bop accompaniment a la Herbie Hancock in the great Miles Davis Quintet and the sort of sound-oriented abstractions that mark much of her own work. (My review of the performance will run in the next issue of the Wire). Agnel is back in Berlin this week, performing at KM28 on Wednesday with madcap turntablist and sonic prankster Joke Lanz, and since I last wrote about her several new albums have surfaced.

Sophie Angel (photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

Rare (Victo) captures a riveting duo performance with English reedist John Butcher recorded last May at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Canada. The back on the album cover features a photo of the performance, with Angel standing at the keyboard, her hands at work inside of the instrument rather than attacking at the keys. Agnel gets her hands dirty, so to speak, bringing a visceral tactility to her playing. Together the pair move between thorny dialogues, with Butcher blowing knotty , tightly-coiled trills, swoops, and patterns against equally compressed figures produced by the pianist, usually in a mix of conventional notes, prepared piano effects, and internal scrapes. Elsewhere the action is spread out over more sustained terrain, with Butcher blowing sere, rheumy long tones and Agnel generating restrained tangles of hanging overtones or internal procedures that invoke a slowly forming storm cloud. It’s a wonderful recording that reinforces Butcher's mastery of saxophonic abstraction while filling out Agnel’s seemingly immeasurable imagination. Below you can hear the opening track, “Rare 1.”

A couple of weeks ago Agnel and Lanz (aka Sudden Infant, the longtime actionist project of the Berlin-based Swiss expat) released a terrific album called Ella (Klanggalerie/iDEAL) that locates a common ground between the two that I didn’t think existed. Lanz is often the fly in the ointment, but here the pair work together to create eleven duets of impressive sensitivity, reactivity, and tension. Agnel doesn’t so much invent new sounds or vocabulary for this partnership as she deftly adapts what’s already in her vast arsenal for a different strain of interaction, deploying highly effective repetition, terse gestures, and broken glass abstraction. One of my favorite pieces is “Wittgensteins Hand,” where Lanz plays a record featuring piano tinkling. Check it out below. He dissects and deconstructs a variety of concise passages, daring Agnel to duet with another pianist. She pulls it off with direct keyboard strokes, but she also thwacks the body of her instrument, plucks at the strings inside of the instrument, and mimics Lanz’s variable-speed pianism in a way that puts him on his heels, embracing more vinyl-oriented swoops and scratches. Such push-and-pull never feels competitive or adversarial as much as it feels like an entertaining, high-wire act of shared sensibilities.

Jules Reidy Embraces Pop Sounds, Gets Weirder

On their new album Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey) Jules Reidy leans further than ever into a weirdly denatured pop music that’s been a kind of sonic magnet for them in recent years. It’s an undeniably strange brew, but Reidy can’t help but retain an experimental essence that somehow makes it both compelling, confusing, and difficult. The album is an extension of the sui generis use of just intonation on confessional folk-pop songs given a slick pop polish and thick auto tune vocal treatments. Reidy’s singing is much stronger here. Previously the singing felt a bit tentative, marred by an inherent shyness which ended up burying the expressions of sadness and solitude. This time out the lyrics and their delivery aren’t obscured, and while autotune is still a feature, Reidy’s actual voice feels much more present, shaping sweet pop melodies that feel closer to incantations than hooks. As usual, the dominant presence is their marvelous guitar playing, a weird fingerstyle approach fed into a viper’s nest of digital manipulation that produces a thicket of gnarled, intersecting lines.

Jules Reidy (photo: Camille Blake)

Several of Reidy’s past collaborators provided sounds that they warped into painterly sound elements—bass parts from Andreas Dzialocha , Reidy’s partner in Sun Kit, cello lines from Judith Hamann, and drum samples provided by metal percussionist Sara Neidorf. Reidy impressively balances those outside sources within their own layers of guitar, electronics, and vocals, reflecting the shiny veneer and structure of pop music, but curdling and thickening the internal elements that’s seductively disorienting. It’s a stunning accomplishment that collates many of the ideas Reidy has been working with in recent years into a kind of master statement, impossibly dense with rich detail. Whether this ends up as a new template or just another stop along a continuum that hasn’t stopped morphing over the last decade is anyone’s guess. I certainly miss some of the unadorned fingerstyle playing that first attracted me to Reidy's work, but it’s hard not to respect their ceaseless exploration. Below you can check out “Breaks,” one of the more direct, explicitly song-based pieces. Reidy will celebrate the release of the new album with a show at Silent Green on Wednesday, March 5, with Max Eilbacher of Horse Lords playing an opening set.

A Duo of High-End Improvising Duos

On the same night a pair of improvising duo share the bill over at Institut Francais. Pianist Craig Taborn and trumpeter Peter Evans are two of the most mercurial, versatile, technically gifted musicians at work today. Both are rooted in jazz practice, but they also possess interests and abilities well outside of the post-bop tradition. They both lead projects built around composition, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say they’re both at their best when they operate without a map. They’ve worked together in a larger contexts, including Rocket Science with Sam Pluta and Evan Parker, so they’re hardly strangers to one another’s interests, but this stop is part of a European tour and I expect they’ll be firing on all cylinders, I’m curious to hear how the trumpeter’s garrulous nature—few musicians can match the superhuman agility, power, and technical precision of Evans, a player whose default setting is maximalist—combines with the often elusive subtlety of Taborn. That’s not to say Taborn can’t unleash fury, but his playing favors more poetic terrain, and it’s often expressed with sly feints, slow-building structures, and unpredictable shifts.

Peter Evans (photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

The evening will kick off with a set from pianist Céline Voccia, a French expat based in Berlin, and scene fixture and alto saxophonist Silke Eberhard. In the summer of 2023 the pair released Wild Knots (Relative Pitch), a bracing set of quicksilver free improvisations that exposed a thornier, more jagged side of the reedist, whose normally one of the most innately swinging saxophonists in Germany, even in fully improvised contexts. But with Voccia—who routinely digs into more bruising territory, generating frictive scrapes and snaps inside of the piano and unleashing torrents of post-Cecil Taylor clusters on the keys—Eberhard reveals a much different side of her personality. Below you can check out “Paradoxe.”

Two Quickies

I’m super excited to check out a new trio organized by the restless Norwegian bassist Christian Meaas Svendsen—a stalwart member of several ensembles led by drummer Paal Nilssen-Love in addition to his own long-running project called Nakama. He’s enlisted the great Berlin-based reedist Tobias Delius, my favorite saxophonist in the city and one of the greatest jazz-based players on the planet, to play in a new configuration with the brilliant Boston drummer Randy Peterson, one of the most overlooked and distinctive percussionists of the last three decades. Sadly, I don’t encounter Peterson’s playing—a kind of rough-and-tumble adaptation of Paul Motian’s dragging swing—nearly enough these days. He rarely gets out of Boston, and his most enduring musical relationships remain with with Beantown figures. He possesses a deep grasp of the imperatives of the singular reedist Joe Maneri, which carry on through his ongoing work with his son, violist Mat Maneri. He does appear on Synchronicity (Sunnyside), a fantastic new record I wrote about a few weeks back by the Korean bassist Jeong Lim Yang with Maneri and pianist Jacob Sacks. I anticipate a rubato feast, with slow-motion swing expanding and contracting with organic beauty. The trio will play one of a handful of European dates on Thursday, March 6 at Sowieso.

The imperturbable Swedish rhythm section of bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin have been the backone of guitarist Oren Ambarchi’s superb Ghosted trio in recent years, but the pair first found their footing under the leadership of reedist Mats Gustafsson in Fire! more than 15 years ago. In fact, Ambarchi first worked with the pair when he served as a guest on the 2012 Fire! album In the Mouth—A Hand. On Monday, March 10 that rhythm section returns with Gustafsson after a lengthy break for a performance at Neue Zukunft. Last year’s flinty Testament (Rune Grammofon) was the first new Fire! album in three years. It was recorded in Chicago with Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio in December of 2022, and the album captures the trio at its dryest and most stripped-down, with a series of meaty yet lean head-nodding excursions in which Gustafsson’s baritone simmers over the deep grooves, spilling over the lines with delicious restraint, each subtle variation and judicious explosion packing a serious punch.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

March 4: Achim Kaufmann, piano, and Kalle Kalima, guitar, 9 PM, B-Flat, Dircksenstr. 40, 10178 Berlin

March 5: Sophie Agnel, piano, and Joke Lanz, turntables, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

March 5: Craig Taborn, piano, and Peter Evans, trumpet; Céline Voccia, piano, and Silke Eberhard, alto saxophone, Institut Francais, 8 PM, Kurfürstendamm 211, 10719 Berlin

March 5: Jules Reidy; Max Eilbacher, 8 PM, Kuppenhalle, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin

March 6: Fo[u]r Alto (Frank Gratkowski, Leonhard Huhn , Florian Bergmann, and Salim(a) Javaid, alto saxophones and percussion), 8 PM, studioboerne45, Börnestraße 43/45 13086

March 6: Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Christian Meaas Svendsen, double bass, and Randy Peterson, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

March 7: Tamara Stefanovich, piano (Boulez, Scriabin, Busoni, Shostakovich, Berg), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin

March 7, Oker (Torstein Lavik Larsen, trumpet, Fredrik Rasten, acoustic guitar, Adrian Fiskum Myhr, double bass, and Jan Martin Gismervik, drums, percussion), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

March 8: Sachiko M, electronics, and Annette Krebs, Konstruktion#4; Chris Pitskiokos, alto saxophone, electronics, and Axel Dörner, trumpet, electronics, in quad, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin

March 8: Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Marta Warelis, piano, Jeremy Viner, tenor saxophone, and Tancrède D. Kummer, drums, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

March 9: Tuung; Dana Gavanski, 8 PM, Kuppenhalle, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin

March 9: El Khat, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin

March 10: Fire! (Mats Gustafsson, reeds, Johan Berthling, double bass, and Andreas Werliin, drums); XCountry Bungalow (Kellen Mills, electric bass, Joe Hertenstein, drums, and Eliad Wagner, modular synthesizer), 8 PM, Neue Zukunft, Alt-Stralau 68, 10245 Berlin