Young German pianist Darius Heid (b.1999) is based in Cologne and Copenhagen, and is well-versed in modern jazz, free improvised music, and contemporary music. He focuses on bending the piano’s sound possibilities and has developed a personal approach to the piano, including a refined palette of extended techniques and preparations. Heid leads a free improvising trio with Dutch double bass player Wilbert de Joode and Danish drummer Kresten Osgood, and the contemporary Ensemble Aroura Nr. π.
Heid aims to create a sonic environment that invites deep listening as a way to explore the very nature of sound, its relations to the room’s acoustics, its intention and coincidence, and the nature of attack and decay in a poetic yet intuitive way, and observe one’s own perception, as well as the performer’s and listener’s immersive space for transformation and self-exploration.
The double album Funkstille features Heid leading a quartet comprised of him on the piano, with cellist Emily Wittbrodt, double bass player Stefan Schönegg and percussionist Moritz Koch, playing live at the late Gothic space Kunst-Station St. Peter in Cologne in August 2023 the 41-minute «Dust, Presence, Scatter, Bloom», and Heid leading a quintet comprised of Wittbrodt, Koch, double bass player Jonas Gerigk (Wittbrodt and Gerigk play in Heid’s free improving Trio Vließ), and electronics player Alfredo Ardia, playing a suite of eight pieces at the Dialograum Kreuzung an St. Helena in Bonn in July 2024.
Funkstille reflects Heid’s musical vision, which investigates the relationship between listening is playing, and playing is listening, and suggests composed music as a collective endeavour. This ambitious ensemble project took about three years to complete, including two study trips to Japan and encounters with the aesthetics of its traditional Nō theatre and the art of Ikebana (flower arrangement). It aims to create music that is quiet yet intensely present, precise and subtle, incorporating themes like resonance, acoustics, timbre, interaction, and perception while exploring the unique, timeless architecture of the «empty» spaces where the album was recorded.
«Dust, Presence, Scatter, Bloom» presents Heid’s aesthetics in its most highly disciplined, austere, restrained manner. The eight shorter pieces on the second album offer more space for intimate improvisation and blur the distinction between contemporary music and abstract sound art, using an electronics setup of amplified natural materials and a prepared gong. This music not only invites deep listening but demands that the listener fully surrender to such a kind of contemplative, deep listening. Funkstille asks to be immersed in its subtle intensity, where its acoustic spaces are illuminated, and our listening skills are being re-sensitised and reframed anew with the familiar. But Funkstille is far from being music for meditation or answering common spiritual wishes. It allows us to consciously experience sound as a rich, vivid entity, and to experience Heid’s idiosyncratic improvisational language that offers a place to focus, to listen with new ears.
Eyal Hareuveni
Darius Heid (piano), Emily Wittbrodt (cello), Stefan Schönegg (double bass), Moritz Koch (percussion), Jonas Gerigk (double bass), Alfredo Ardia (electronics)
