SongOfMu

In the organizer's words:

JazzToday

SongOfMu

Instrumentation:
Bo-Sung Kim - Janggo/Jing/Kkwaenggwari
Matthias Mainz - prepared and unprepared piano/live processing
Oliver Potratz - double bass/e-bass/electronics

SongOfMu develop their sound as if in a continuous movie, on whose foil subtle grooves merge with influences from Korean gugak and krautrock, free jazz, minimal and electronics. The music, the songs of SongOfMu are composed of multi-stylistic impulses from the material that the crossover-experienced musicians pull out of the depths of their musical subconscious in improvised, often trance-like passages to form a common band sound.

Bo-Song Kim plays the double-sided hourglass drum janggo and the gongs jing and kkwaenggwari with an understanding of pulse that originates from Korean gugak music. She applies her playing techniques from traditional contexts in noisy actions on wood, skin and metal, sometimes like a Cage-interpreting sound researcher and sometimes creating a rhythmic foundation for SongOfMu, which in its energetic reduction is more reminiscent of Jackie Liebezeit's work for CAN than of traditional jazz or free jazz contexts.

In Matthias Mainz's playing on prepared and unprepared grand piano, percussive minimalist ideas alternate with stylistic outbursts from the 20th century's collection of jazz, minimal, free jazz and new music material. His live processing of the grand piano and the impulses of his fellow players acts as a counterpart, throwing an electronic arc around the musical flow of ideas of SongOfMu.

Oliver Potratz positions his double and electric basses in SongOfMu with ease between acoustic and electronic sound, between avant-garde and free jazz modes, playing with minimalist groove fragments, jazz and noise, and sometimes even swinging up to the suggestion of a soloistically distorted electric guitar. The stylistic influences are always audible - but unfold in improvisation in such a reduced form that they never become too strong and too solid in context and threaten to topple over.

SongOfMu creates a shared space in which the temporality of the musical fragments merges into the timelessness of the reduced improvisational flow. The Korean "mu" stands for meanings such as wind, dance or nothingness, perhaps as in the indeterminate moment before a note is struck.

with the kind support of the Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Münster.