Conception Vessel (ECM, 1973) is the debut album of American master drummer Paul Motian as a bandleader, featuring pianist Keith Jarrett, double bass player Charlie Haden, and violinist Leroy Jenkins. The openness and diversity of influences won the admiration of the quartet Confusion Vessel, featuring Belgian, Basel-based sax player Anouk Neyens, Finnish, Basel-based guitarist (and sound designer) Mikael Szafirowski, Italian, Milan-based drummer Stefano Grasso (who plays with Neyens in the Tier des Jahres quartet), and French-Swiss, Geneva-based violist, vocalist, and sampler player Mona Creisson (who plays with Grasso in the Killer Whales Music Theory quartet, and also a member of Tier des Jahres).
Confusion Vessel began working in 2023, first as an experiment inspired by French Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s drifting theory and Society of the Spectacle. Later on, this working quartet developed its music with inspirations from political theories, natural phenomena, chaos theory, the movements of the waves, and children’s songs. Live at AMR is the debut album of the quartet and is the outcome of a four-night residency at the AMR (l’Association pour l’encouragement de la Musique impRovisée) in Geneva. Szafirowski mixed and mastered the album, and released it on his label, Subject to Change.
The album offers four improvisations that exhaust Confusion Vessel’s unorthodox instrumentation and its different personalities, but with a restless need to experiment and immerse itself in unpredictable sonic territories and in different dimensions of reality. This is an egalitarian quartet that focuses on collective, free-associative and quite surreal improvisations that are not shy of benefiting from strange noises, sonic accidents, and musical misunderstandings. The music flows organically and reaches its inventive, complex climax in the last piece, «Strange Attractor», a title that captures the essence of Confusion Vessel.
Eyal Hareuveni
Anouk Neyens (saxophones), Mikael Szafirowski (guitar), Stefano Grasso (drums), Mona Creisson (viola, voice, sampler)
