Moritz von Oswald Trio
Dissent
Moritz von Oswald Trio returns with »Dissent«, a striking new album that explores the scope of jazz and dance music within abstracted electronic music. It follows the Sounding Lines LP from 2015 with a further explorative and daring sound, which dives through broad ambiences, uptempo dance and jazz sensibilities.
As ever with albums from the Moritz von Oswald Trio, this new album, recorded during November and December 2020 in Berlin, emerged from a series of long extended jams then edited down.
For Dissent, the trio takes on a new formation, with American artist Laurel Halo and jazz drummer Heinrich Köbberling joining Moritz von Oswald. Through the album, they expose an experimental sound world, improvising over grooves and embedded effects. These performances intimate trust and understanding between the musicians, as each pushes and pulls the others, resulting in fantastically compelling compositions. Crashes of free drums reverberate into peripheral trenches as solemn organ licks smear the distorted vision forwards. This peculiarity takes shape in its extraterrestrial production, carving out its unique structural form with warped frequencies and abrupt switches.
As the middle of the album draws in, the trio’s elongated scene-setting motions further into dense environments and gently deepening drums. With the trio shifting towards stable foundations in noise and groove, the dance beckons, recalling some of techno’s jazzier inclinations while veering untethered towards into unfamiliar territory. As ever with Moritz von Oswald’s productions and sonic expressions, traditionally non-percussive sounds, effects and noises accentuate an inherent groove. This lack of reliance on conventional devices for embellishing rhythm provokes such sonic freedoms, with Halo, Köbberling and von Oswald discovering thrilling new terrains. Constantly moving and genuinely immersive, Dissent marks the result of three musicians playing together at the top of their game.
About the Artist (Read more)
Moritz von Oswald, legendary master of electronic experimentalism and technical exactitude, has an unassailable place in the modern history of forward-thinking music. To follow his career is to take a guided tour through some of the most important developments, places and people in the history of electronic music.
Trained as a classical percussionist, von Oswald joined avant-garde new wave band Palais Schaumburg in the early 80s. His growing interest in the possibilities of electronic music culminated in a landmark collaboration with Thomas Fehlmann in 2MB (and 3MB with Juan Atkins). By the early 90s he had gone on to found Basic Channel (with Mark Ernestus) whose releases would go on to define and epitomize various strains of electronic music.
As a central figure in the Berlin electronic music scene which coalesced around the Tresor club and label,vonOswaldhelpedinitiateanddevelopthefamousBerlin-Detroit-Chicagoaxis, collaborating with pathbreaking artists in the burgeoning Techno scene across the Atlantic such as Juan Atkins, Eddie“Flashin”Fowlkes, Jeff Mills and many others.
As half of both Maurizio and Rhythm & Sound (again with Mark Ernestus) he transformed this new sound in respectively minimal and dub-inflected directions, originating traditions in electronic music that continue to this day. Von Oswald’s influence on the fledgling music scene in Berlin also had a more concrete dimension flowing from his tireless work as a mastering and cutting engineer at the legendary Dubplates & Mastering studio – contributing to acclaimed releases on imprints such as Warner, Universal, Sony and Columbia records as well as a slew of the most important works in electronic music.
Over the last decade, von Oswald has branched out into more experimental and improvisational contexts: a landmark release for Deutsche Grammophon which commissioned him and Carl Craig combine to recompose music from Ravel and Mussorgsky, a critically acclaimed collaboration with Norwegian jazz trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer for Universal Music as well as continued recorded and live work as The Moritz von Oswald Trio which sees him’conduct’ Max Loderbauer, and legendary Afro-beat pioneer Tony Allen. He has also released multiple works as well as toured extensively with Juan Atkins (the individual credited with sparking the techno music genre) as Borderland and has released further solo works. Von Oswald’s later work builds on his illustrious output from the 90s and 00s – which has now entered the canon of truly original and influential electronic music – and expand it through novel projects, collaborations and performances.