American, Brooklyn-based tenor sax player Stephen Gauci began in March 2019 to document his free-improvised sessions with local, innovative musicians, among them pianists Cooper-Moore and Matthew Shipp, guitarists Joe Morris and Ava Mendoza, and double bass players William Parker and Michael Bisio. In June 2018 Gauci met for a «rough and tumble outing» two like-minded comrades – Hans Tammen who plays on the vintage analog synth, Buchala, and drummer Jeremy Carlstedt.

These three musicians performed with different bands on the same night at Brooklyn’s celebrated weekly, Monday Bushwick Improvised Music Series, curated by Gauci. Tammen, Carlstedt and Gauci liked what the other was doing and said: «I sure could use some of THAT weirdness up in my stuff…». 

«Studio Sessions Vol. 11» delivers that weird promise. 45 minutes of restless and unconventional music, that moves freely from urgent, raw attacks to detailed timbral search. The dynamics differ in each of the six pieces. The trio begins with intense sax shouts, otherworldly bubbling sounds of the Buchala and energetic, free and fragmented drumming; moving to a more sparse and abstract piece, spiced with multiphonics and alien synth noises; contrasting the sax multiphonics and overtones with vintage beeps and powerful drumming; letting Carlstedt set a hypnotic rhythmic pattern on the following piece and ornamenting it with ecstatic sax playing and weird synth sounds; building on that powerful eruption and exploding on the fifth, most intense improvisation, and the short, final piece.

Intense and addictive stuff.

Eyal Hareuveni   

Hans Tammen (buchla), Stephen Gauci (ts), Jeremy Carlstedt (dr)