Pat Thomas - piano
Joel Grip - double bass
Antonin Gerbal - drums

To follow up on their first album Nature in its inscrutability strikes back (Umlaut Records 2015), the unclassifiable European trio سم [ISM] is releasing two new recordings captured during a studio session in Tokyo in November 2018. The first part titled Metaphor was released on CD in the spring of 2019 while the second installment - the LP Japanese Flower - will be available in June 2021.

اسم [ISM] Japanese Flower_Excerpt [Pat Thomas, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal]

VAKA is an exploding band bringing together four strong personalities from today's Post-European improvised and experimental music scene. Their music is hypnotic and cathartic, made from spasmodic rhythms and words of mouth. Their uncommon use of hands, feet and voices redefine sound and form through acoustic instruments and electronic machines. A healing dreaming wake of the ill fated tongue. From the knowledge they developed in bands like [Ahmed], Yeah You! and BAHK, they can deploy an ancient and modern music : all at once (now and then).

VAKA:
Elvin Brandhi – vocals, field recordings, tapes, vinyls, instruments
Daniel Blumberg – vocals, guitar
Joel Grip – bass
Antonin Gerbal – drums, percussion

VAKA (Elvin Brandhi, Daniel Blumberg, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal) - Excerpt

"We were improvising, and improvisation had a crisis: it froze.

We improvise, and the process of improvisation bugs: we leave it at that, and this is our music.

We improvise, and what is supposed to happen in the suspense of memory, the suspense of the project, the suspense of what the fluctuating duration of improvisation is based on, the suspense of everything, has collapsed.

It has collapsed, and we have fixed ourselves in the debris of this collapse, frozen the state of things and plunged into this position as one would necessarily plunge into a point on the surface of the water.

Terminus.

We stuck to it."

(Jean-Luc Guionnet)




antonin gerbal - drums
jean-luc guionnet - alto sax
pierre-antoine badaroux - alto sax

Jupiter Terminus (Guionnet, Badaroux, Gerbal) Excerpt

Ahmed Quartet

Seymour Wright - alto sax
Pat Thomas - piano
Joel Grip - bass
Antonin Gerbal - drums

El Haris - Anxious

antonin gerbal - drums

http://antoningerbal.com/projects/sound-of-drums

Sound of Drums (excerpt)

antonin gerbal - drums solo
http://antoningerbal.com/projects/sound-of-drums

Qualia (excerpt)

Pat Thomas - piano
Joel Grip - double bass
Antonin Gerbal - drums

To follow up on their first album "Nature in its inscrutability strikes back" (Umlaut Records 2015), the unclassifiable European trio سم [ISM] will release two new recordings captured during a studio session in Tokyo on November 2018. The first part titled Metaphor will be released on CD in Japan and Europe for spring 2019 while the second installment - the LP Japanese Flower - will be released by the end of the year. This long and dense diptych exposes and propels a music populated by sound fictions that pulverise the listening habits of the jazz trio format. Sometimes polyphonic, meditative, pulsed and repetitive, abstract or falsely simple, this music carried by three high-flying improvisers is intended to be crude, direct, labyrinthine, always rooted in sound mattere, as consisting of abrupt breaks and renewed continuities. Like the floral compositions of the Ikebana artist Junichi Kakizaki (who oversaw the design of this diptych), this music is « like a flower » in the sense that « it enjoys a unique custom or system, or philosophy, ideology and artistic sense ». The four pieces engraved on these two albums each bear a name of flower - this music becoming a metaphor of the plant.

antonin gerbal

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