Hautzinger / Zoubek / Schick / Buck
Franz Hautzinger - quartertone trumpet, electronics
Philip Zoubek - prepared piano, synthesizer
Ignaz Schick - turntables, sampler
Tony Buck - drum
Finally the second album from the otherworldly improvising quartet of Tony Buck, Franz Hautzinger, Ingaz Schick, and Philip Zoubek, an ensemble now known as Pulsar.
The new recording was made at a live performance at the Loft in Cologne in December of 2024, and it captures a radically different sound than the group’s debut, Silt, recorded at the same venue four years earlier.
Its members rank as some of the most celebrated and distinct free improvisers in Europe, each of them performing in countless ad hoc groupings and working bands, but they achieve an exponential boost in one another’s company. The group has little use for the rigid orthodoxies of free improvisation, as they gamely draw upon their vast collective experiences and interests to take extended explorations as a band, somehow braiding gestural abstraction and irresistible propulsion. On two extended tracks the ensemble never settles into a single sound world, although “Tendrils” brings out more extroverted, bruising attack, while “Valis” embraces an ambiguous and hushed fragility.
Buck, the Berlin-based Australian drummer widely known for the grace of the shape-shifting rhythms he supplies in the Necks, functions as a different kind of armature here, his off-kilter kit machinations maintain a febrile pulse while simultaneously fracturing time into a contiguous series of juddering objects.
Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger has been toggling between blustery, post-Miles Davis smears and almost microscopic unpitched breaths for decades, and as usual his playing both revels in his brass instrument’s essential characteristics and seems intent on obscuring them.
While Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Schick is an accomplished saxophonist with deep jazz roots, here he sticks to turntables and electronics, an equally facet of his practice. In Pulsar he injects surprising textures and noise scapes, simultaneously filling out the sound field and provoking his collaborators hold their ground or switch gears.
In that regard Zoubek, the Cologne-based Austrian keyboardist who first brought the ensemble together, is Schick’s sonic brother, nonchalantly swinging between jazz, fusion, and free improv, depending on the context. In Pulsar he leans into a kind sound sculpting, his prepared piano and synthesizer sounds occupying crevices in Buck’s drumming, caressing and expanding Hautzinger’s blurts and whinnies, and contrasting Schick’s tactile vinyl sputters and drones. When the quartet performs someone must initiate things, but the music is ultimately a state of being more than a concrete piece with a beginning and an end. The four voices are in constant communication, building new constellations of texture, motion, and color.
FRANZ HAUTZINGER
Philip Zoubek - prepared piano, synthesizer
Ignaz Schick - turntables, sampler
Tony Buck - drum
Finally the second album from the otherworldly improvising quartet of Tony Buck, Franz Hautzinger, Ingaz Schick, and Philip Zoubek, an ensemble now known as Pulsar.
The new recording was made at a live performance at the Loft in Cologne in December of 2024, and it captures a radically different sound than the group’s debut, Silt, recorded at the same venue four years earlier.
Its members rank as some of the most celebrated and distinct free improvisers in Europe, each of them performing in countless ad hoc groupings and working bands, but they achieve an exponential boost in one another’s company. The group has little use for the rigid orthodoxies of free improvisation, as they gamely draw upon their vast collective experiences and interests to take extended explorations as a band, somehow braiding gestural abstraction and irresistible propulsion. On two extended tracks the ensemble never settles into a single sound world, although “Tendrils” brings out more extroverted, bruising attack, while “Valis” embraces an ambiguous and hushed fragility.
Buck, the Berlin-based Australian drummer widely known for the grace of the shape-shifting rhythms he supplies in the Necks, functions as a different kind of armature here, his off-kilter kit machinations maintain a febrile pulse while simultaneously fracturing time into a contiguous series of juddering objects.
Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger has been toggling between blustery, post-Miles Davis smears and almost microscopic unpitched breaths for decades, and as usual his playing both revels in his brass instrument’s essential characteristics and seems intent on obscuring them.
While Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Schick is an accomplished saxophonist with deep jazz roots, here he sticks to turntables and electronics, an equally facet of his practice. In Pulsar he injects surprising textures and noise scapes, simultaneously filling out the sound field and provoking his collaborators hold their ground or switch gears.
In that regard Zoubek, the Cologne-based Austrian keyboardist who first brought the ensemble together, is Schick’s sonic brother, nonchalantly swinging between jazz, fusion, and free improv, depending on the context. In Pulsar he leans into a kind sound sculpting, his prepared piano and synthesizer sounds occupying crevices in Buck’s drumming, caressing and expanding Hautzinger’s blurts and whinnies, and contrasting Schick’s tactile vinyl sputters and drones. When the quartet performs someone must initiate things, but the music is ultimately a state of being more than a concrete piece with a beginning and an end. The four voices are in constant communication, building new constellations of texture, motion, and color.
RELEASES
RELATED ARTISTS
REGENORCHESTER XIIFRANZ HAUTZINGER
