Peter Brotzmann

Peter Brötzmann, Fred Lonberg-Holm – Memories of a Tunicate (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:01:58 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Relative Pitch Records

“Together, Brötzmann and Lonberg-Holm have released two excellent prior duos … This latest CD, Memories of a Tunicate, may be the jewel in their crown. Credit is due to Lonberg-Holm’s liberal use of electronics. Against Brötzmann’s muscular saxophone, the cellist can bring a saturating wall of sound to parry that machine gun attack. This music is, though, not a face-off but a flow. Blasts of sound are tagged and escorted rather than opposed. Like the individual track titles, which are names of obscure sea creatures, the music is designed (actually, improvised) to be shrouded and a bit surprising. Brötzmann often draws from melancholic extended technique with an old soul’s blue feel. For his part, Lonberg-Holm bows and plucks his cello, expanding it into a violin, bass or an electric guitar sound, accented at times with shards of industrial noise. This is one entertaining and exhausting recording.”
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Peter Brotzmann, Fred Lonberg-Holm – Ouroboros (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 40:42 minutes | 390 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Astral Spirits

Recorded by Stefan Deistler at Loft Köln on January 18, 2011.

Faced with a daunting discography that tallies to triple digits, it’s easy to forget that Peter Brötzmann has also been a prolific visual artist for the entirety of his professional career. The two forms expression still regularly cross-pollinate in his work with original paintings and woodcut prints serving as album cover art and the vivid and visceral feelings conjured by his uncompromising music fueling the coarse and stark subject matter of said imagery. A painterly dynamic is particularly present in his many duo encounters. Most commonly with percussionists, but also increasingly with less intuitively-matched instruments that supply texture and color field focused canvases upon which he can scrawl and scribble in bold and often bruising strokes by way of his battery of reeds. Ouroboros is a vinyl document of one such dialogue, recorded at The Loft in Köln, Germany in early 2011 and pressed to just 300 copies.
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