Label: Confront

当店激推しの女性トリオユニットによる第二弾アルバム!!凄まじい演奏技術を持つピアニストMagda Mayas、共にAnother Timbreを含む様々なコンテンポラリー/即興レーベルに音源を残すバイオリニストBiliana Voutchkova & リコーダー奏者Miako Klein、この三者によるシリアス即興ユニットJane In Ether 。1stから4年越しで発表された待望の2nd作[Oneiric]。演奏は全て即興、1stよりも持続的なサウンドアプローチを深く掘り下げた作品で、終始張り詰めた緊張感が漂う硬質な音が多い内容ながら、催眠的な要素も登場する深遠な表現に成功。マスタリングはJoe Taliaが担当。







Miako Klein - recorders
Magda Mayas - piano
Biliana Voutchkova - violin, voice

"I was seriously impressed by Spoken / Unspoken, the 2021 debut album by the Berlin trio Jane in Ether, which includes pianist Magda Mayas along with violinist Biliana Voutchkova and recorder player Miako Klein, but the trio’s fantastic follow-up Oneiric (released, like its predecessor, by Mark Wastell’s Confront Recordings) proves what can happen when a group develops it sound over time, slowly congealing into an approach where its components are increasingly elusive. Once again the music is all improvised, but for the most part this new release digs deeper into a unified approach to sustained sound than the debut. To be sure, there are passages when the three instrumentalists carve out distinct areas of interrogation, improvising as three voices meticulously weaving their output together, such as the opening moments of “soaring” where Mayas produces a carpet of percussive resonance both directly upon the piano’s strings and mediated through objects, Klein blows unpitched breaths in alliterative spams, and Voutchkova weds vocal fry, wordless meandering, and delicate, weightless bowed violin tones, but the bulk of the record almost feels compositional in terms of how cohesive the individual transmissions operate as one. For me the undeniable highlight of the new album is the title piece, a nineteen-minute excursion where the component sounds meld wondrously into a tactile, ever-shifting meditation marbled with endless textural variation and harmonic movement. Taste is personal, of course, but these days the improvised music that routinely speaks loudest to me is when musicians achieve this kind of spontaneous sonic marriage, working collectively, and subsuming individualities in pursuit of a massed ensemble sound in which each particular element exists to serve the whole. Of course, this approach isn’t new and we could look back to AMM as one potential starting point, but I feel like this approach has achieved a critical mass of late. This sort of pursuit actually feels far more non-idiomatic than any of the improvisation that once claimed that mantle. “Oneiric,” which you can hear below, continues to pull me and transport me to some hypnotic zone where I marvel at the way the variegated voices align into one without surrendering all of that rich, internal detail. My listening takes me in and out of awareness of who is doing what—sometimes I can’t figure it out at all, which is wonderful—and it registers as a profound expression, an area where the musicians come together in some ineffable place as instinct and intimacy with pure sound becomes the guiding consciousness." (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street)