Forced to Feel documents the free improvising trio of Israeli-born, New York-based guitarist Eyal Maoz (of Hypercolor and Edom) with Italian long-time collaborators, reed and electronics player Piero Bittolo Bon, and drummer Zeno De Rossi (both playing in Unscientific Italians). The album was recorded after a European tour in November 2024 at La Pila in Sorgà, Italy, a place immersed in the fog-laden, metaphysical countryside of the Veneto plain, where fields dissolve into mist, and silence feels suspended, amplifying every gesture and pause.
The almost otherworldly setting of the recording session charged the rich sonic palette of the trio. Maoz, with assorted effects and loops that introduce a psychedelic aroma, Bittolo Bon, who alternated between the soulful alto and baritone saxes, ethereal shakuhachi, and noisy electronics, and De Rossi, who used drums and bells to sculpt and bend time through texture, weight, and sudden fracture, guaranteed a completely different yet nuanced, layered, and imaginative musical universe in every piece. The trio insists on free improvisation as an art that focuses on unrepeatable sonic experiences, hovering like nervous butterflies (as one of the pieces is titled) between tension and release, instability and quiet celebration.
Forced to Feel highlights the trio’s immediate and urgent dynamics that were established on its tour. The trio sounds as if it has already established its own irreverent, risk-taking aesthetics, and the studio session allowed it to further develop them. It brings elements from avant-rock, free jazz, electronics, and Middle Eastern Jewish resonances into its own language. But this trio refuses to subscribe to any genre and only extracts fleeting coordinates in distinct, irreverent ways, while swinging between the dense, hyperactive, and volatile and the exotic, cosmic, and lyrical. The last piece, «Pull Me Into the Blue Water», best captures the restless, imaginative aesthetics of this trio, flirting with African desert blues, exotic Far-Eastern cinematic images, and psychedelia, and telling a suggestive story with a fluid sensibility of time.
Eyal Hareuveni
Eyal Maoz (electric guitar), Piero Bittolo Bon (alto saxophone, baritone sax, shakuhachi, electronics), Zeno De Rossi (drums, bells)
