Steve Hubback is a Welsh free improviser-drummer-percussionist who began his career as a musician in the late seventies and since the nineties also as a unique craftsman of gongs and cymbals and for his percussive installations. His sonorous creations were used by Scandinavian drummers and percussionists like Paolo Vinaccia, Marilyn Mazur, Knut Finsrud, Audun Kleive and Michala Østergaard-Nielsen.

Hubback’s new solo album The Last Free City is described as «music for sound sculptures and percussion» and it was recorded at Boston MassArt (Massachusetts College of Art and Design) in November 2023. It was mixed and mastered by American polymath Elliott Sharp.

The title piece is a 17-minute featuring Hubback’s self-crafted mobile sound sculpture made of Aluminium. Hubback plays this sculpture with bows and delicate touches that highlight its distinct resonant timbres while creating an otherworldly-sounding tension and sketching a loose dramatic-rhythmic narrative that ends with a quirt, almost spiritual meditation. The following two short percussive pieces – «The Workshop of Amazing Creations» and «The Last Free Thought» are playful and demonstrate Hubback’s idiosyncratic aesthetics on his devised percussive or drum set, augmented with his gongs and cymbals, as a rare free spirit who always searches for new sonic adventures.

Eyal Hareuveni

Steve Hubback (percussion, mobile sound sculptures)