Berolina Suite

“A mechanistic, almost non-expressive playing stance, with the aesthetics of renouncement or of leaving out instead of filling in.”
—Sven-Åke Johansson

“What’s most striking about Barcelona Series, though, is how unmechanical most of the music sounds. True, Dörner frequently makes sounds with the trumpet that the horn was never designed to produce – everything from hissing gas pipes to guttural, grinding engines. Neumann adds crystalline cascades and creaking bedsprings, and evidently applies an electric fan to the piano strings à la AMM tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe. Johansson deftly coaxes a broad palette of timbres and textures from his simple kit. The performers place every note and sound in silent space as delicately and deliberately as Anton Webern or AMM, and if the sounds themselves may be akin to industrial noise, the careful volition with which they are combined is distinctly musical – and distinctly human.”
—Steve Smith, Jazztimes

Audio excerpt