Luisa Muhr is an Austrian, New York-based vocal and interdisciplinary artist, who is creating free improvised music, installations, performance art, graphic compositions, experimental theater, and video works, and is known for her collaborations with American sax player Daniel Carter’s PlayField and vocal artist Shelley Hirsch. In Travelogue captures Muher’s free improvised aet with Swiss, New York-baaed tenor sax player María Kim Grand and American, Vienna-based guitarist Eric Arn, recorded live at live at Viennese renowned club Porgy & Bess in April 2024. This is the first recording of this ad-hoc trio, released as a limited edition turquoise double vinyl and a download option.
The music is based on Muher’s wordless, spontaneous and free-associative, emotional stories, delivered in a seductive voice and witch-like, commanding authority when she is totally possessed by her colorful, dramatic-theatrical stories, while caressed by Grand’s economic and often intimate and lyrical tenor sax lines but pierced by Arn’s restless, thorny guitar lines. The eight pieces leave enough space to sculpt and mold these immediate improvisations into instant, poetic and imaginative compositions-stories that strip in real-time the collective consciousness of the trio and let the «inside come out», as one of the pieces is titled, and at other times just building loose bridges (as another piece is titled), between the contrasting approaches of the three musicians.
Teuflin/She-Devil features Muhr in another free improvising trio with the Canadian, London-based bass clarinetist Emily Suzanne Shapiro (with whom she recorded The Cosmic Hand, (Self-Released, 2023) and Mexican bassist (and filmmaker, aka Loope) Adriana Camacho (the trio played in American French horn player Abe Mamet’s The Thing We Fought For, Estavelle, 2023), recorded in one take at Villa Colombo in Rome in 2023. But this 29-minute, structured improvisation is based on Muhr’s handmade 12-page graphic score and texts in German from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, all centering on the «spirit that denies», i.e. Mephistopheles (or rather Mephistophela).
These texts suggest a feminine, subversive perspective on the concept of «evil», questioning the separation of «good» and «evil», specifically as found in Western traditions. This is a more introspective, patient, and thoughtful improvisation based on Muhr’s charismatic vocal delivery. It questions the imagery and architecture of the graphic score and encourages each musician to improvise with positive and negative spaces of each image in the score, their angle variations, their outlines, and their density.
Eyal Hareuveni
Luisa Muhr (voice), María Grand (tenor saxophone), Eric Arn (guitar), Emily Shapiro (bass clarinet), Adriana Camacho (bass, effects)
