In Situ Ens. is an international electro-acoustic ensemble that develops music out of the instant. The ensemble features American, Berlin-based trumpeter Liz Albee, British harpist Rhodri Davies, Swiss sax player Christian Kobi, Italian percussionist Enrico Malatesta, and German pianist Magda Mayas and electronics player Christian Müller, all known for their unorthodox, extended techniques that expand the sonic spectrum of their instruments in order to evolve dynamic textural landscapes. The debut album of the ensemble was recorded at HKB Bern in May 2022.

Same Place is a delicate, five-part suite that demands deep listening not only from the musicians but also from the listener in order to fully explore its subtle, captivating beauty and countless sonic secrets. The impressive array of personal, innovative extended techniques blur the timbral distinction between the acoustic instruments and the electronics, and often it is impossible to know who produced the arresting, elusive sounds – the quiet breaths and suggestive voices, almost transparent percussive touches, scratching of resonating strings, or the mysterious electronic drones. But the music flows with free imagination and impressive depth. Gently and patiently the music colors the wide and spacious canvas of this suite with intriguing colors and enigmatic sounds and develops toward a powerful emotional conclusion in its final part.

British sound artist-author-scholar David Toop described the listening experience of Same Place in poetic liner notes: «A soft disturbance in which the quick rustles against the quicker and slow is held in the palm, bird awaiting its fate, its rapid pulse blurred into secondary song, steady as if holding the hand that supports it, emanating as a small sun, punctured, snapped, dusted by urgent hands, tapped by a nervous quiver… What happens is now and gone. Only the faint hum of dying skin cells and thin hairs remain… Little patience in this time with the enclosures of human music. Only materials, objects, forces, movements, surfaces, touching, resonance, relations, fields, microcosms of time, small songs that sing alone but together, in spaces of imagined airs, untouchable dimensions that invite exploration by listening».

Eyal Hareuveni

Liz Allbee (tp), Rhodri Davies (harp, electronic harp), Christian Kobi (s), Enrico Malatesta (perc), Magda Mayas (p), Christian Müller (elec)