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LP
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MACROM 083LP
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With Dispersion, Loom & Thread return to the volatile architecture of the expanded piano trio -- and quietly fracture it from within. Daniel Klein (drums), Tobias Fröhlich (double bass) and Tom Schneider (keys, sampler) remain the sole agents on stage and in the final recording. The triangle holds. And yet, the field has expanded. For their second studio album, the trio fed their improvisations with the timbral signatures of guest saxophone and vibraphone players -- not just as additional voices to be featured, but also as material to be absorbed, atomized and redistributed. The result is not augmentation but thorough refraction. Where the debut album explored the recursive labyrinth of Schneider's live sampling of his own piano, Dispersion introduces an external grain into the feedback system. Breath and metal. Reed turbulence and struck resonance. The trio sampled extended improvisations by saxophone and vibes players: Victor Fox, Asger Nissen, Volker Heuken, and L&T's own Daniel Klein; dissected their attacks, overtones and decay curves, and integrated these fragments into the trio's internal circuitry. What emerges is a play of presences without bodies -- instrumental ghosts circulating through the dense weave of rhythm and keys. A vibraphone shimmer appears, yet no mallets are visible. A reed multiphonic surges through the texture, bending space between bass and drums. These events are neither quotations nor overlays; they are redistributed energies, dispersed across the trio's grammar. A digital multidimensional interplay ensues. The sampled materials from other improvisers are stripped of their erstwhile two-way interaction and reconstituted as malleable particles. Signifier detached from origin, resonance detached from gesture. The trio navigates a constantly shifting topology in which acoustic memory and electronic manipulation are indistinguishable. Crucially, the album never abandons the physical urgency of three musicians reacting in real time. The additional timbral layers do not thicken the texture into opacity; rather, they introduce stark points and arrows of diffraction. Dispersion is not about addition but about distribution -- of agency, of timbre, of temporal perspective. It is an album in which the trio setting becomes a site of multiplicity without surrendering its immediacy. A dissolution not only of the divide between present experience and memory, but between inside and outside, self and other. Three musicians. Countless vectors. A music that fractures in order to cohere.
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CD
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MACROM 068CD
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Loom & Thread appear to present a take on this most classical of springboards of improvised music: the piano trio. Indeed, Daniel Klein on drums and Tobias Fröhlich on double bass forge that highly engaging, interlocking framework, set in complex juxtaposition to what emanates from the corner of Tom Schneider on keys. This would be a superbly satisfying triangle of planar relational wonder on its own. Imaginative re-adaptation of unexpected shifts, re-grouped into coherent streams of musical thought. Superb clarity despite the pressurized density of form, the emergence of intricate order from spontaneous play. And yet this would be an utterly incomplete description. Because a dozen directions and dimensions and interdependent layers open like trap doors all around, shattering any first impression of a familiar context within just a few seconds of listening. What appears to be piano improvisation in the post-bop tradition soon exhibits abrupt disruptions, impossible shifts, improbable repetitions, movements in frequency and dynamics beyond the physical capabilities of a fixed-pitch instrument deemed so familiar. How so? Tom Schneider samples his own playing and continuously feeds it back into the ongoing collective stream of the trio. Assigning starting points to the sampled phrases, these are then treated as independent musical events just like the individual tones they contain: a second order of access is created. Signifier and signified in the hands of the same musician, thus driving a two-pronged plane of immanence. This meta-improvisation is thrown at the other two players who now find themselves embroiled in some kind of three-dimensional chess game: fending off simulacra and responding to both, idiosyncratic primary phrases of tones and a vibrant multitude of sampled variants. Reflexivity: the piano/sampler continuum with its multi-layered access points to improvisational mapping is then attacking and soothing and further teasing the appropriately angular rhythm section. A wondrous dissolution of the divide between experiencing now and accessing memory.
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