Antumbra, the third album of the duo of producers-electronics player-sound designers – Austrian keyboard player Elias Stemeseder and German drummer Christian Lillinger – expands and refine their experimental sonic and compositional searches focused on thematic multidimensionality. This album offers a series of 17 concise pieces of plucked, percussive and electronic instruments, manipulated and layered in post-production to the point of sonic saturation, with references to sample culture, serialism and strangely enough, folk music.

Antumbra (pre-shadow; from Latin ante «before», the region from which the occulting body appears entirely within the disc of the light source) is a post-genre work that reflects on a hybridized sonic present and acts as a canvas for projections of possible sonic futures. Stemeseder and Lillinger designed and realized this album as a sonic vision of what has not yet been shown and seen and what may be a hopeful future. The album was recorded during 2022 and 2023 at Figure 8 studio in New York, with another session in Athens, Georgia, and with guest musicians and additional recordings of performances in Cerkno, Bezau and Florence.

Antumbra hosts guest musicians – guitarist Brandon Seabrook, gayageum player and Doyeon Kim, sax player Mark Shim and bassist Tim Lefebvre, and explores meta-beats and cut-up techniques, multidimensional structures, polyphony, collage, tuning and spectralism. The multi-perspective outcome is channeled into a restless series of labyrinthian and kaleidoscopic clashes between the sonic abstractions of utopia and dystopia, often incorporated with great precision and immediate temporal realization, but at other times suggesting unsettling, abrupt and fragmented and even nightmarish sonic landscapes.

Eyal Hareuveni

Elias Stemeseder (piano, spinett, synthesizer, electronics, sampler), Christian Lillinger (drums, sampler, synthesizer, electronics), Brandon Seabrook (guitar, banjo), Doyeon Kim (gayageum), Mark Shim (saxophone), Tim Lefebvre (electric bass)