Some of the Kids Are Alright
Horsegirl, Miman with Fredrik Rasten, Simon Lucaciu Trio
This week’s newsletter is on the short side: too many deadlines for paid work have impeded on the prep this newsletter demands. I apologize, but as much as a lot of my favorite music dissolves time, it’s become an inescapable presence when it comes to writing.
Horsegirl Break Through (To Me)
Regular readers can tell that rock music doesn’t really fit into my musical diet these days, but once in a while something cuts through and engages me. When that does happen I’m usually hesitant to weigh in, as I don’t feel like I have enough awareness of what’s happening today to provide any meaningful context. I’d say I’m intrigued to understand where the trio Horsegirl fit within today’s indie rock continuum, but I’ve consistently enjoyed the group’s second album Phonetics On and On (Matador). I’d seen enthusiastic chatter about the band, which emerged from Chicago a few years ago as part of a wave of high school bands making a big splash. (Their counterparts Lifeguard just played here in Berlin last week.) Although the trio members have all moved to New York, the new album was made in Chicago at Wilco’s Loft, with Welsh pop auteur Cate Le Bon producing. Given her penchant for stripped-down arrangements, twitchy energy, an ongoing fondness for early new wave, I have to assume she helped the trio attain a new focus. I listened to the trio’s 2022 debut Versions of Modern Performance and I didn’t notice much that would augur what they achieved on the new record.
Influences and stolen ideas about, whether the mash-up of “Roadrunner” and “Peggy Sue” on the hooky opener “Where’d You Go?” or the primitive violin sawing on “2468,” which you can hear below, purloined from the Raincoats, but Horsegirl consistently transcends those sources with a mix of exuberance, smarts, and seriously infectious if simple melodies. I could hear a bit of K Records style pop buried beneath the overblown guitar on the debut, but here the arrangements pare down anything extraneous. The vocal interplay between guitarists Penelope Lowenstein and Nora Cheng might seem basic, but its execution on “Where’d You Go” is simultaneously rigorous and ebullient, and the insouciant divide between whimsy and focus across the album has made me a convert. Horsegirl plays Lido on Wednesday, June 12.
Motvind Comes to Berlin
Late next week I’m headed to Norway, where I’m happily attending this year’s edition of the Motvind Festival in the remote forest area of Rollag. I had a blast last year and this year’s line-up is equally enticing. This week Berliners can get a small taste of the Motvind world, which is also a record label and cultural guild, with two of the collective's most interesting projects performing in town. Last year I wrote about Naaljos Ljom, the Stavanger duo of Anders Hana and Morten Joh, when they played the final edition of A L'arme Festival, and they return to play Kantine am Berghain on Wednesday, June 11, playing on an eclectic bill with Berlin vibraphonist Els Vandeweyer and New York’s Extra Life, the reunited Charlie Looker combo that brings a prog-rock drive to old madrigal forms. The following evening, June 12, the trio Miman will perform at Sowieso with guest guitarist Fredrik Rasten, a frequent subject in this newsletter who just marked the release of his terrific new album Strands of Lunar Light by performing the music with fellow guitarist Ruben Machtelinckx at KM28.
Miman is the improvising trio of double bassist/analog synth whiz Egil Kalman, reedist Andreas Røysum, and violinist Hans P. Kjorstad—the latter two have been the driving force behind Motvind since it first emerged in 2016 to protest the sponsorship of the Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway by Kongsberg Gruppen, a major weapons manufacturer that happens to be the small town’s biggest employer. (It took a few years, but their endeavor was successful). I’ve only seen Miman once, when they played in Berlin with drummer Michael Griener a few years back, but I’ve been a big admirer of its recordings, and I’m in the process of writing an essay for a forthcoming four-CD box that reveals the trio’s adaptability and depth while marking its tenth anniversary as a working ensemble. One of the albums included in the set is a collaboration with Rasten, which is utterly transfixing, a set of eight liquid improvisations where the foursome reveals a striking ease, sculpting new sound worlds on every piece. Free improvisation is always a challenge, as disparate voices attempt to create something resonant out of thin air; recordings frequently reflect that real-time struggle, pregnant moments of uncertainty or tentativeness hovering until something takes shape. But with this partnership there never seems to be a loss or conflict—of course, that can be a good thing in some contexts. Instead, I’ve been immersed in a remarkable world of gurgling, gentle sound filled with surprises, simultaneous melodic lines, ever-changing timbres, and spontaneous harmonic constellations. It’s kind of a sweet spot for my current sonic interests and I can’t wait to be immersed in a fresh atmosphere this week. Miman hasn’t released any music since it released 1000 Bitar, but you can check out “Sawakuro,” one of its gems, below—but don’t expect the full picture of the trio’s sonic universe from one piece.
The Transparency of the Simon Lucaciu Trio
It can pretty hard for young musicians to fully shed their influences in the early days of their career, and the Simon Lucaciu Trio, a mathy post-bop group from Leipzig, didn’t do much to dispel them when it released its 2023 debut album STRG + X (ezz-thetics). It’s hard to overlook how trios like Punkt.Vrt.Plastik and the Bad Plus had impacted the sound of the group: pianist Simon Lucaciu, double bassist Florian Müller, and drummer Lukas Heckers. All three musicians were under 24 when they recorded the tunes, so there’s something amusing about the claim made by Ulrich Steinmetzger in his liner notes: “…there is no room for nostalgic memories.” Considering their ages, I’d say there was also no time for “nostalgic memories.” Still, despite recurring flashes derivativeness—Heckers seems to have placed the playing of Christian Lillinger on a pedestal, while the leader’s solo on the closing track “X elf” sounds like a love letter to Ethan Iverson—I’ve enjoyed listening to the album, and all three players are impressive. Müller has become a fixture on the Berlin scene, and when he was even younger Lucaciu made a fine showing behind Günter “Baby” Sommer on the 2022 album Karawane (Intakt).
The group certainly tries to shed debt to more traditional manifestations of piano trio music, aligning instead with a distinctly European rhythmic aesthetic that can come off as stiff and fussy, undercutting much sense of forward propulsion in favor of spasmodic fits-and-starts. The band delivers within that context, but that doesn’t stop me from yearning for the players to relinquish the hyper-controlled attack and just ride something out based more upon feel than precision. On the other hand, there’s something breathtaking in the way the pianist and bassist move around in time and harmony in the opening minutes of “Bird of Prophets,” remaining fiercely exploratory even after the drums enter, a three-way pivot that’s thrilling. Just as fun is the stop-start, slice-dice machinations of “mor + phing,” its title indicating an idea and execution they’ve borrowed wholesale from Punkt.Vrt.Plastik. Below you can hear one of the more schematic tracks from the album, the relentlessly pointillistic “umrisS.” The trio plays Donau115 on Friday, June 13.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
June 10: Danish String Quartet (Mozart, Shaw, Haydn, Stravinsky, O’Carolan, Shostakovich), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
June 10: Kiko Dinucci, guitar, vocals, and Luise Volkmann, saxophone; Peter Ehwald, saxophone, Tomasz Dąbrowski, trumpet, Matthias Pichler, double bass, Ivars Arutyunyan, drums, 8 PM, West Germany, Skalitzer Straße 133, 10999 Berlin
June 11: Naaljos Ljom; Extra Life; Els Vandeweyer, 8 PM, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin
June 11: Caspar Brötzmann Massaker, 8 PM, Bi Nuu, Schlesische Strasse 2, 10997 Berlin
June 11: Horsegirl; Euroboy, 8 PM, Lido, Cuvrystraße 7, 10997 Berlin
June 11: Jakob Astrup, guitar, Julius Gawlik, tenor saxophone, Jonas Westergaard, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97, (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435, Berlin
June 11: Weston Olencki; Stefan Maier; Flickering (Billiana Voutchkova and Heather Frasch), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
June 12: Trá Pháidín; Dylan Kerr; Yara Asmar, 7 PM, 90mil, Holzmarktstr. 19-23, 10243 Berlin
June 12: The Unsmart Duo (Jasmine Guffond, electronics, and Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet); Droszkhi, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
June 12: Julius Gawlik, tenor saxophone, Felix Henkelhausen, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
June 12: Miman (Egil Kalman, synthesizer, double bass, Hans P. Kjorstad, violin, and Andreas Røysum, clarinets, flute) with Fredrik Rasten, guitar, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
June 13: Simon Lucaciu Trio (Simon Lucaciu, piano, keyboards, Florian Müller, double bass, and Lukas Heckers, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
June 13: Faces & Places (Michaël Attias, alto saxophone, Flo Müller, guitar, Jonas Westergaard, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
June 14: The Hard Quartet; Dragged Up, 8 PM, Hole, Hermannstraße 146, 12051 Berlin
Horsegirl is great live, too - catch them if you can!