Double bass player, gumbri, and oud player, the founder of the Le Fondeur De Son label, Yoram Rosilio, calls his band The Anti RuBer BrAiN FacToRy (ARBF), a nebula of sound experimentation that resists brain formatting and Mass Culture. This genre-defying Paris-based band, founded in 2008, is an «initiative of cultural destabilization designed to awaken the world from its dreamy lethargic comforts by offering a seamless and uncompromising music».
Blautonschweben is ARBF’s ninth album. Rosilio composed the music during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, while he was staying in Vienna, and it was recorded in December 2024, after a crowdfunding campaign. The album’s title – Blue-toned floating in German – is a linguistic invention that can be translated as «suspended blue» or «suspended in blue», combining Blau (blue), Ton (tone/sound), and Schweben (to float/suspend). This title captures the essence of this album, which explores an improbable and fascinating fusion of blues, Arnold Schoenberg-ian «suspended tonality» known as the twelve-tone technique or dodecaphony, and Rosilio’s obsession with North African rhythmic traditions. Nothing unusual in the aesthetics of ARBF that has been exploring traditional Maghrebian music, Free Jazz, Rebetiko, traditional music from Puglia, Finnish waltzes, noise music, and free improvisation.
Rosilio’s compositions for the ARBF septet are fascinating sonic poems that sketch surprising, unpredictable, and supposedly impossible, poetic architectures that employ the «suspended tonality» of the experimental but strict Second Viennese School, with the emotional feel and the natural flow of the blues, and the liberating, sensual rhythmic modes of North African maqams, Maghrebian, and Gnawa music, inspired by esoteric traditions. These sonic poems are seven ‘suspended’ blues, floating organically in their own imaginative, inclusive spaces, inclassifiable shades, tones, and hybrid and unnameable colors.
The Anti RuBer BrAiN FacToRy demonstrates what jazz in the 21st-century should sound like, an ambitious, alchemical brew of composition and improvisation, wit and fun. Blautonschweben is thought-provoking but totally captivating, cerebral but deeply emotional, and revolutionary but visceral, and performed in a most commanding manner.
Eyal Hareuveni
Yoram Rosilio (double bass), Fanny Menegoz (flute, piccolo), Jean-Michel Couchet (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone), Florent Dupuit (tenor saxophone, flute, piccolo), Daniel Beaussier (oboe, English horn, bass clarinet), Jessica Simon (trombone), Rafael Koerner (drums)
