Swiss, Berlin-based turntables wizard Joke Lanz (aka Charles Testa, and Sudden Infant) is one of the busiest musicians on our planet, performing and constantly releasing albums with like-minded, genre-defying, and thought-provoking improvisers.
Ella is the second album of French master pianist-free improviser Sophie Agnel with Joke Lanz, following the trio album with American, Amsterdam-based drummer Michael Vatcher, Animals (Klangglerie, 2023). The album was recorded by Martin Siewert (the guitarist of Radian) at his Viennese studio in April 2024, except for two pieces recorded at instants Chavirés in Montreuil in November 2022. Joke Lanz did the collage of the cover artwork.
Like in the previous collaboration, Agnel and Joke Lanz exchange brilliant, Dadaist sonic punches that simultaneously, empty this hyperactive, free improvised interplay of any high-brow importance but inject into it healthy doses of subversive, highly imaginative, and inventive ideas. Agnel plays inside the piano and produces poetic, unorthodox, and resonant sounds and Joke Lanz knows how to extend and shape these sonic threads into equally poetic, rhythmically fragmented fireworks. Suggestive and insightful titles like «Elevator for Alligator», «Rehearsal for Retirement», «The End of Handwriting», and «Sporadic Bursts of Sympathy» point to the idiosyncratic sonic sensibility of these true sonic magicians. and intensify the irreverent spirit of this album.
Tühü is the second album of the Joke Lanz’ How Noisy Are The Rooms? trio with German vocal artist Almut Kühne, who is also a classically trained singer and pianist, and Austrian drummer Alfred Vogel, who releases the trio albums on his label, Boomslang, and organizes the Bezau Beatz festival. This album follows the trio’s self-titled debut album (Boomslang, 2021). The trio arranges four poems of German avant-garde visual artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada, and hosts legendary American vocal artist Shelley Hirsch (who recorded two duo albums with Joke Lanz, Berlin + Brooklyn, Rossbin, 2012, and 11.11.15, OTORoku, 2018), on two pieces. The album was recorded at Titos Zentrifuge Berlin in June 2023.
The album revolves around the free-associative, pixie-like, and seductive vocal delivery of Kühne and her spontaneously invented texts, often in her mysterious, wordless lingo, or with the borrowed poems by von Freytag-Loringhoven. Joke Lanz and Vogel cleverly frame and ornament Kühne’s unpredictable, labyrinthine, and urgent train of vocalizations with subversive, fragmented grooves that propel her into even wilder and higher, roller coaster rides, and together they know when all sonic options are exhausted and know when it is time to move on. Tühü is a masterful lesson in chaotic, imaginative freedom, charged with endless creative energy. Hirsch, after a glass of champagne, spreads her magic on “A Dozen Cocktails Please” and “Parapluie” and kicks the chaotic dynamics into sensual, dream-like fantasies. Waiting anxiously for the next adventures of this great trio.
Combination Without Repetition is the first recording of the free improvising, working duo of Joke Lanz and German composer-sound artist-percussionist-sound designer, Thomas Rehnert, captured by ü is a masterful lesson in chaotic, imaginative freedom, charged with endless creative energy. Hirsch, after a glass of champagne, spreads her magic on «A Dozen Cocktails Please» and «Parapluie» and kicks the chaotic dynamics into sensual, dream-like fantasies. Waiting anxiously for the next adventures of this great trio.Combination Without Repetition is the first recording of the free improvising, working duo of Koke Lanz and German composer-sound artist-percussionist-sound designer, Thomas Rehnert, captured bRehnert at Reichenbergerstrasse in Berlin in 2020. Joke Lanz plays on turntables and Rehnert on acoustic drums, analog modular systems, and video synthesizers, and the restless and Dadaist yet highly nuanced, electroacoustic music flows seamlessly between noise, drone, techno, hardcore, and free jazz elements.
The album – released as a limited edition of 20/20 hand-cut vinyl, treated vinyl, and machine drawing vinyl plus a download option – offers two extended, chaotic, absurdist, and totally captivating improvisations. The first one, «Variation», is described by Daniel Blumin (of WFMU, New York), as something that may happen on your daily constitutional, when «you pass sixteen Gyuto monks headed for trouble. You stroll on, but now you’re in a video game, and you are the pinball». The second one «Permutation», deepens the surreal, eccentric, and provocative images and textures of the first improvisation, with brief, exotic-Eastern quotes.
Eyal Hareuveni
Sophie Agnel (piano), Joke Lanz (turntables), Almut Kühne (vocals), Alfred Vogel (drums, percussion), Shelley Hirsch (vocals), Thomas Rehnert (analog synthesizer, percussion)
