”Improvisation is a tool for the discovery of new ways of communicating at the cracks of the unexposed,” wrote the young Basque musician and composer mattin in the liner notes to his CD he produced together with Mark Wastel, Vault. An self conception that finds its adequate expression on his first release for GROB.
Building Excess was recorded on July 4 last year in the legendary Vienna studio of Christoph Amman (GROB435 Absinth) was also recorded here as were numerous other recordings of the Vienna scene from Radian to Werner Dafeldecker). mattin had a stipend and was able to stay in Vienna for a longer period of time. The strength of this recording, its stringency, is indebted to this longer stay for the most part: the music doesn’t seem ”spontaneous” or ”surprising,” but rather as if a group was playing together that had developed a common vocabulary over many years. Of course, this quartet is not a working band, since the interests of the musicians are too different. The common act of reflection, however, is audible. Although very little happens, the listener always hears a tension. It may be the smallest possible tension, but it is one. Therefore the piece – Building Excess is made of one long improvisation – does not sound disparate. There is something that holds the few tones together, which seem simply thrown together: a common pulse, a common effort. Building Excess contradicts all the (conventional, ”classical”) rules of collective improvisation and yet the piece is exactly that: a collective improvisation. Radu Malfatti, the earlier free jazz trombonist (see the recording from 1979, Sven-Åke Johansson‘s NMUI, GROB 650) and current composer of radical new music, certainly inspired this recording decisively with his aesthetic of stillness, yet he does not dominate it. That too is an expression of this special collective effort.
mattin plays computer feedback(s), Klaus Filip, an enormously important programmer in the Viennese scene, plays digital electronics, Radu Malfatti the trombone and Dean Roberts, known for his records for Erstwhile, Mille Plateaux or – recently – Kranky, can be heard on the guitar.

Klaus Filip

Radu Malfatti (also on GROB313/4, GROB650)

mattin

Dean Roberts

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GROB652 Alessandro Bosetti - Zona