Four star Y is a Berlin-based band named after a hat. It features three ex-pats who are well established in the local, fertile free improv scene – American decorated synthesiste and face-shifting interplanetary messenger Liz Kosack, crazy Norseman Dan Peter Sundland who is dressed in suits and has naughty electric bass etiquette and Australian drummer and electronics player Steve Heather, known as an unkempt vicious southerner with a dangerous mix of humor, virtuosity, and modernist chivalry. Together, on their debut album, they suggest high-level artistic free improvised music, meticulously crafted, with butt-shaking multilayered grooves.

**Y** was recorded live in July 2017 at the mysterious G5 basement, «a place now lost to time», by Sundland, and mixed by him and Heather. It offers six hyperactive and dense textures that highlight the way this trio operates as a single organism. Its timeless sonic aesthetics stress its rich and constantly shifting rhythmic vision that never doubts where it is headed. It navigates organically between psychedelic, space-prog landscapes to acrobatic fusion, and from complex free improvisation to to infectious dance grooves but it is always careful to avoid familiar, tired pitfalls.

It is clear that Kosack, Sundland and Heather had tons of fun while cooking this state of flowing, disjointed bliss. This strange brew is made of explorative and expansive soundscapes, grooves and counter-grooves and an inventive mix of extended techniques and acoustic and electronic sounds. Or, as in Four star Y poetic description of its chaotic, sonic melting extravaganza: «Unknit pulsations bob and intermingle like cheap colored wax drooping into snakepiles oozing over sugar frosting whose moisture glints in a low hazy firedance on the spongy plane of the uttermost top-layer».

Eyal Hareuveni 

Liz Kosack (synthesizers), Dan Peter Sundland (electric basses), Steve Heather (drums, electronics)