Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Order the CD version of the album Ampair:e. As eco-friendly as possible, this six page digipack is made from recycling-paper with a foam knob instead of a plastic tray and without the use of shrink-wrap.
Includes unlimited streaming of Ampair:e
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Ampair:e is the first album of the equal named trio of the electric improvisers Hanna Schörken (voc/efx), Constantin Krahmer (synth/fx) and Bernd Oezsevim (drums/percussions). The album was made from material recorded during a residency at Maschinenhaus, Essen in April 2021. All tracks are completely improvised. On tracks 3 + 6 Berlin-based musician and Sound Artist Ignaz Schick is featured on turntables/sampler/preparations. It was nominated for the long list 1/2022 of the "Preis der Schallplattenkritik" in the category "Electronic/Experimental".
About the music:
Sound; emerging from the eternity of nothing. Molecular, directionless, undefined: always in a variable dialogue with silence. The sound takes hold of space; manifests itself, dissolves into organic and inorganic compounds. A voice, the squeak of a turntable, electronics, percussion. The drums mellow down into a groove, the voice pushes back, the synthesizer moulds a framework which the other components follow.
Ampair:e is the collective triad of vocal artist Hanna Schörken, pianist/synth player, Constantin Krahmer and drummer Bernd Oezsevim. Though each artist comes from very different camps of jazz and improvised music, together they courageously intersect through both their dichotomy and commonality in this constellation. This is the music of Ampair:e like the timeless undefined space before the Big Bang where everything is possible: nothing is excluded and the process of collaboration results in the context within which the event can develop. The elasticity, flexibility and transparency of the music, constantly both compressing and drifting apart, releases an array of associative spaces. The listener will hear jazz as free improvisation, as trance music, as electronic or electroacoustic music, but even be transported to the reaches of iconic 70s era German Psychedelic Krautrock.
Songs and musical structures are formless, where lyrics are instantaneously created at the moment of performance. But instead of improvisation in the traditional sense, Hanna Schörken, Constantin Krahmer and Bernd Oezsevim intuitively feel the changeability of the sounding aggregate states of their tracks. It’s as if the music was already manifested through this three-headed medium in the room; vague torsos of song structures emerging from the background, eluding pursuit as soon as one tries to grasp them. Repetitive rhythms get lost in a delta of sounds: the voice is disembodied, the synthetic sounds acquire a strong physique. Within the music, all components are shifted in order to allow a multitude of possibilities on the projection screen of the reception depending on their mental state, location, or time of day.
Ampair: e was founded in 2016, initially by Schörken and Krahmer, with Oezsevim joining in 2018. The music of the debut album and the live videos were created during a 14-day residency at the Essen experimental performance hub, Maschinenhaus. Before this intensive work phase, the trio’s rehearsals were spaced out as singular events over a period of months, creating an open yet heterogeneous musical aesthetic.
“From a musical point of view, we don't really fit together at all,” Hanna Schörken would laughingly say, while acknowledging that this collision of artistic backgrounds fits surprisingly well, precisely because of their differences. Together, they form a three-dimensional space that does not need to be defined or categorized.
It is impossible to find stylistic comparisons with Ampair:e. Fans of Susanna & The Magical Orchestra can enjoy the album as much as listeners of Faust, Supersilent, Annette Peacock, Jeanne Lee or Autechre. There are no conscious creative reference points with Ampair: e, but only partial musical parallels in phenomena in the wide cosmos of the uncategorizable. Rarely can one find genuine original creation not based on what has come before, but formed and explained from itself. The common thread that runs through the album is the desire for self-manifestation from something that did not exist before.
“The space always has an influence on what you do,” summarizes Hanna Schörken. “The Machinenhaus in Essen belongs to a very old part of German industrial culture. We wanted to be there because of it being so isolated and secluded. The initial idea was to create a space for this project. It was difficult at first to define what we wanted that space to be. Yet as we began to play, we found that we could always create something out of this space. Personally, I always had the feeling that the shape was there, and I was chiseling slowly away towards a sculpture. The form became more and more defined for me over time. "
Listening to Ampair:e has both the feeling of simultaneously looking down at the earth from a satellite and penetrating the structure of an atom with an electron microscope. Wave or particle? Ampair:e leaves the decision up to the listener, for - as trivial as it may sound - it is only when you listen to the transcendent sound sculptures of Hanna Schörken, Constantin Krahmer and Bernd Oezsevim, do new worlds open up to the listener to discover.
Text by Wolf Kampmann (translated by Carrie Dimaculangan)
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