Two CDs by the young swiss musician Christian Weber. Christian Weber, who did his musical studies in Graz and Linz, is active in several projects of improvised or composed music. Current projects include WAL (with Bruno Amstad & Joke Lanz), WWL (with Urs Leimgruber & Christian Wolfarth), Mersault, Wiesendanger-Weber-Ulrich and Space Madness (with Richard Koch and painter Zasd). Regular performances with ensembles for contemporary composed music (a.o. Collegium Novum, RSO Vienna...).

With 3 Suits & A Violin he presents his own ensemble and music. Accom-panied by four musicians from Austria and Switzerland, they are exploring dynamics, sound and textures in AMM-like improvisa-tions. From the last sentence you may conclude that we deal here with a typical european kind of improvisation or avant garde music with AMM as an important point of reference. A kind of music that fortunately still attracts younger musicians nowadays and audiences (I hope). The line up is: Koch (bass clarinet, saxophones, electro-nics), Moser (cello),

Siewert (guitar, lap steel, electronics), Wolfahrt (drums) and Weber on doublebass. Moserand Siewert you may know from Polwechsel. The music for this CD arises from a open concept that Weber composed and that is worked out and giving shape by all five improvisors. All of them are equally involved in coloring these sound-scapes. While listening to the music it is my experience that it has strong sense of direction and structure. Whether this is the result of the structuring quality of the underlying concept, or of the improvisational qualities of the players I am unable to judge. But the raw and subtile noises, are well-tempered and -balanced interwoven into a whole that succeeds to keep the atten-tion of the listener.
The recordings already date from 2002 and are now at last released by HatOLOGY. So I am not sure whether we are talking here of history, meaning that the ensemble does no longer exist. I don't hope so, because their improvisations are satisfying and imaginative.

Dolf Mulder