Part 2

Jazz has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

I think musical roots or socialisation will always be influential in your musical decisions somehow. We just don’t want to actively engage with them.

We once used the wording “negative space of popular music” to describe what we want to do. We play with distorted references towards popular music, but they mingle with experimental approaches and create an ether where familiar bits and pieces might flash up or lurking behind our sound structures as silhouettes.

How much potential for something “new” is there still in jazz? What could this “new” look like?

Like I mentioned above, there are numerous reasons why I have my difficulties with the word jazz. I think that a lot of music nowadays that calls itself jazz-something I’d consider quite far away from it.

I think the driving force that fueled jazz can be found in various forms of music. So, I don’t really worry about semantics here, but I know that there’s always new grounds to explore musically and socially and artistically.

For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. How do you see that yourself?

The exchange happening between the audience and the band is unique in a live context. It has a different purpose and impact than, for example, an album production that is consumed in the artists absence.

The performative interaction with the audience is very important for us and impacts our music strongly. It’s a form of coming together and sharing a momentum.

You asked before about political attitudes in our music. We think experiencing a shared moment can have a strong impact which I guess can be sort of “life-changing”.

How, would you say are your live performances and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?  

As I said above, a studio production differs in its nature to a performance, so we felt we wanted to create something different than the live experience and separate those two mediums.

Live we sound rougher than on our album. In the studio we had the ability to overdub, produce and really shape our music. We were more in control of what we do and how we wanted the result to be. It was a starting point and inspired us to go even deeper into the possibilities of studio production in the future. We’re excited to record more songs.

Right now, we’re working on our live set again after a long process of post-producing the album. We want to explore the possibilities that live performance offers. Our goal was never to have fixed compositions that we played just like in the studio but to work with the energies emerging between us and the audience.

Improvisation is obviously an essential element of jazz, but I would assume that just like composition, it is transforming. How do you feel has the role of improvisation changed in jazz?

I think we’re often improvising on a textural and structural level. We improvise collectively rather that having solos.

For us improvisation is a means of expressing artistic urgency. This urgency changes with time. I feel that for my taste, solos for example are a bit outdated in that expression. I feel fascinated by the skill and craftsmanship whenever I hear a good solo, but it’s limited in its expressive force.

If we bring up again music as a language, if people keep on saying the same things in the same way, it can get boring. Language changes, words change, meanings change, reality changes. You must adapt to those changes eventually.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation?

One of the key aspects for me personally in improvisation is creating simultaneous events. Also creating a sound and at the same time manipulate its spatiality, the background so to say.

I think we rather improvise with texture, rhythm, and form rather than with melodic material. As I said before we’re interested in a broader understanding of sound incorporating a depth in sonic events rather than exploring harmonic or melodic possibilities.

Are there approaches, artists, festivals, labels, spaces or anyone/-thing else out there who you feel deserve a shout out for taking jazz into the future?

There are countless. I could never list all of them here.

What we noticed in our studies at the time was that music underwent lots of academisation. I think future “jazz” should not be academic. For my taste I admire bands or artists who interweave different backgrounds and find something genuine. I think what bores us a bit, regardless of skill, is formulaic music and I feel that a strong academisation of music will lead to that.

So, to name just one person, which we feel inspired by as an artist as well as a teacher is Julian Sartorius. He is working in so many different fields with a huge variety of artists. The way he keeps on exploring and searching is extremely inspiring for us, and his enthusiasm is very contagious.

[Read our Julian Sartorius interview]
[Read our Chuchchepati Orchestra interview (which includes Julian)]

Of course, there are so many people – even just in Lucerne – that deserve a shout out, from festival organisers to music reviewers.

The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feel it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?

If it’s made accessible for everyone, I think it can be a good thing. I think the point of this would be to make it available for everyone.

We started to focus on and learn more about archiving our own work better. I think it’s nice to stumble upon things that you already forgot about, but I also know that it’s only a fracture of the work that might be labelled worth keeping.

However, it doesn’t necessarily contradict each other. We think artists and curators have a duty to keep pushing art that is contemporary and of immediate relevance but it’s also of value to have people preserving and archiving the treasures of the past.