Shaking Off the Winter Blues
Tongue Depressor, Kastanie Night, Looty Trio
Enveloped in the Deep Tones of Tongue Depressor
I’ve been out of town the last two weekends, visiting Cologne and Oslo, respectively, to check out a bunch of music. Such travel always presents a drag on the action here, eating up listening and writing time, so as we get back into the swing of things here in early 2024 the newsletter is still a bit leaner than usual. Starting this weekend the live music calendar is bustling again here in Berlin, but the one show I’m most excited for is part of the re-opening of Sowieso—which was shuttered for nearly all of 2023 for sound insulation work— is the performance by American duo Tongue Depressor on Saturday, January 20. The initial schedule at the legendary improv spot is super impressive, with a more varied program than usual—with the current closure at KM28 for the first couple of months of the year, as it undergoes sound insulation of its own, this return and variety is welcome.
Tongue Depressor is Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey, two deeply curious musicians from New England who pursue a variety of creative paths. Rowden played on Crying in Space (Relative Pitch), one of my favorite free improv albums from last year—a scalding session with saxophonists Mette Rasmussen and Paul Flaherty with drummer Chris Corsano. Birdsey also operates on various fringes as a composer and member of the weird folk group Old Saw. When they join forces as Tongue Depressor, however, their focus is unabashedly tilted toward generating almost monolithic slabs of sustained sound, otherwise known as drones, a term I hesitate to use since it’s been so abased by an endless profusion of lame, unimaginative musicians in recent years. The devotion Rowden and Birdsey have maintained to the exploration of dense long tones since they started working together in 2018 is impressive for its strong-willed sense of purpose and the varied timbres they’ve managed to conjure on their own and with collaborators including on a couple of recordings from last year, with Weston Olencki on Don’t Tell No Tales Upon Us (Dinzu Artefacts) and John McCowen on Blame Tuning (Full Spectrum).
The duo is wildly prolific. Rowden’s main instrument is double bass, but across the duo’s discography he’s added not just fiddle, but tapes, microtonal organ, and banjo, while Birdsey routinely toggles between fiddle, pedal steel and lap steel guitars, cello, bells, organ, harmonium, and Scottish parlor pipes. For this current tour the pair have been sticking with double bass and the pipes. No single release better captures the breadth and essence of the duo like last year’s sprawling Bones of Time (Worried Songs), where each of four extended works varies both instrumentation, intensity, and sweep. Still, the basic thrust of Tongue Depressor’s music is rooted in how two (or three) voices can meld to conjure a deep swell of sound to get lost within.
The results never feel excessive in their darkness or treacly in ornamentation. Rather, Rowden and Birdsey consistently enter a transcendent zone where sound transports the listener into psychedelic realms, where the din can function as a healing balm or a crushing onslaught of contemplative, lapidary detail. Depending on the instrumentation the music can engage in vibratory shimmers, muffled, choppy abrasions (thanks to tape manipulations that impart dropouts, speed fluctuations, and garbled, wobbling pitch), or deep, kaleidoscopic resonant low-end fantasias. Below you can hear the piece “Hymns of Mud,” which offers a nice glimpse of the basic m.o., but it’s worth checking out the duo's extensive Bandcamp page, where you can hear nearly all of its music streaming.
Short Takes on Recommended Shows This Week
Gerhard Gschlößl is one of the best jazz trombonists in Berlin, a steady presence that’s worked with the likes of Silke Eberhard, Meinrad Kneer, Marc Schmolling, and Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra, among many other collaborative contexts. His ubiquity can be partly explained by his inventive, soulful playign: last month he released Solo 1, a recording of solo improvisations recorded at the 2022 edition of the Kollektiv Nights Festival, where doubles on tuba. It’s one of the few recordings issued under his own name, but his versatility is on full display, bridging the gap between post-bop orthodoxy and gritty abstraction, sleek lyricism and full-bodied sound sculpting. Below you can check out the lovely opening track, “Spring.”
He’s also an invaluable community member, operating Trouble in the East Records, one of the most reliable imprints documenting the local scene, and organizing the Panda Jazz series. Those last two endeavors come together with this annual Trouble in the East Records Festival, which happens this month at the Panda Theater, with two weekends of music presenting 12 projects over the next two Fridays and Saturdays. You can find the full program for this weekend in the listings at the bottom of this page.
Among the performers this weekend is the unusual trio Kastanie Night, which performs Friday, January 19. The group’s self-titled debut was recorded back in 2018, but it only saw release on Gschlößl’s label in 2022, documenting the rigorous, sometimes playful interactions between double bassists Jan Roder and Ben Lehmann with alto saxophonist Paul Engelman. All three musicians contribute composed material and there’s also plenty of group improvisations scattered across the album’s 20 mostly succinct tracks—Lehman’s multi-partite “Kein Badespaß für Nazis in fünf Sätzen” is a notable exception, clocking in at nine action-packed minutes. I’ve embedded that piece below, as it conveys the group’s admirable shape-shifting range, as different functional roles shift as the performance unfolds, whether it’s the twined post-Charlie Haden tendrils the bassists concoct for Engelman’s lithe solos, passages of richly variegated sustained tones, or knotty three-way exchanges.
The Swiss group Looty Trio celebrates the release of its debut album Boxer Rebellion (Aut) on Friday, January 19 at Peppi Guggenheim. (The album titles makes sense when you learn the group is named after Queen Victoria’s nickname for the pet Pekinese dog looted from the Old Summer Palace in imperial China at the end of the Opium Wars). The boisterous recording, much of it awash in heavy reverb to enhance the music’s springy energy, seems to draw inspiration from several American bands where the tuba played a central role: Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy and Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus. Most of the solo space is afforded to tenor saxophonist Sebastian Strinning, but it’s veteran tuba master Marc Unternährer that provides the essential glue and fills up much of the color field, his nimble playing providing fat bass lines and elusive texture. On “White Lotus” he toggles between unidentifiable animal growls, overhead jet engine howls, and earth-moving long tones, until his thick puffs coalesce into a mournfully melodic foundation. When the group, which is driven with serious heft and groove by drummer Valeria Zangger, picks up a full head of steam as on a tune like “Armant,” Strinning’s searing improvisations suggest a steady diet of Threadgill’s most lacerating solos, straining against the framework while maintaining a profound equanimity. Elsewhere Unternährer’s upper register flourishes recall the elasticity of trombonist Bob Stewart’s crucial role in Bowie’s famous brass ensemble. Below you can check out the slinky “Mass Individualism.”
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
January 17: Müller/Mahall Moden (Florian Müller, guitar; Rudi Mahall, clarinet, bass clarinet; Ben Lehman, double bass; Uli Jenneßen, drums), 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435
January 18: Marcin Masecki (piano) & Eldar Tsalikov (clarinet), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
January 19: Alexander von Schlippenbach & Aki Takase (pianos), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
January 19: Trouble in the East Records—Jazz & Experimental in Berlin 2024 (Kastanie Night; Pierro Bittolo Bon; Dan Peter Sundland’s Home Stretch), 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435
January 19: Ultraschall Berlin Festival—Elnaz Seyedi/Ehsan Khatibi: PS: and the trees will ask the wind (Sarah Saviet,violin; Susanne Fröhlich, Paetzold flute; Rie Watanabe, objects), 9 PM, Heimathafen Neukölln, Saal, Karl-Marx-Straße 141, 12043 Berlin
January 19: Looty Trio (Sebastian Strinning, saxophone; Valeria Zangger, drums;
Marc Unternährer, tuba), 8 PM, Peppi Guggenheim, Weichselstrasse 7, 12043 Berlin
January 20: Hatis Noit, 8 PM, Silent Green, Kuppelhalle, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
January 20: Ultraschall Berlin Festival—Ricardo Eizirik: Adolescência (Hakon Stene, expanded drum set; Jennifer Torrence, expanded drum set; Carola Schaal, clarinet, voice; Roberto Maqueda, synthesizer, live electronics, sampler; Francesco Palmieri, electric guitar; Ricardo Eizirik, live electronics), 9: 30 PM, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin
January 20: Trouble in the East Records—Jazz & Experimental in Berlin 2024 (Saito/Roder/Griener; Silke Lange; RE:2NITE), 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435
January 20: Ángeles Rojas & Florian Kolb; Tongue Depressor (Henry Birdsey, Scottish parlor pipes & Zach Rowden, double bass), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
January 21: Ultraschall Berlin Festival—Ensemble Apparat (Enno Poppe, Ragnhild May, Joanna Bailie, Jorge E. López), 2 PM, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin
January 21: Der lange Schatten (Håvard Wiik, piano; Michael Thieke, clarinet; Antonio Borghini, double bass), 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin
January 22: Michaël Attias/Felix Henkelhausen/Marius Wankel, 6 PM, Café Plume, Warthestraße 60, 12051 Berlin