Tradition is usually treated like a fragile object: handle with care, don’t touch too much, definitely don’t plug it into an amplifier. "Sephardic Dialogues I–III" takes that idea, folds it neatly, and puts it somewhere out of sight.

The Sephardics approach centuries-old Sephardic material not as a museum artifact but as something unfinished, still arguing with the present. This three-part release - spread across collaborations with Biensüre, Oren Ambarchi & Ramesh Shotham, and Elliott Sharp - doesn’t so much “reinterpret” tradition as place it under pressure and observe what survives.

The premise sounds dangerously worthy: three years, three programs, heritage meeting experimentation. The result, fortunately, is far less polite.

The first disc, with Biensüre, is the most immediately disorienting. Sephardic melodies slip into anatolian-tinged psychedelia, disco fragments, and electro-funk textures that feel slightly unstable, like a dance floor built on uneven ground. Vocals drift between intimacy and incantation, while the rhythmic framework keeps shifting just enough to prevent comfort. It’s the closest the project comes to something resembling groove - and even that is handled with suspicion.

The second chapter, featuring Ambarchi and Shotham, withdraws from that outward energy and turns inward. Here, space becomes the primary material. Ambarchi’s extended guitar work stretches tones into long, patient lines, while Shotham’s percussion introduces a kind of organic complexity that never settles into pattern. The Sephardic themes appear almost as echoes, emerging and dissolving within a broader field of sound. It’s less about dialogue in the conversational sense and more about cohabitation - multiple musical languages sharing the same air without fully merging.

By the time Elliott Sharp enters on the third disc, any remaining sense of stylistic stability is quietly dismantled. Sharp, being Sharp, doesn’t “adapt” to the material so much as interrogate it. The result is the most fragmented and unpredictable section of the trilogy, where avant-garde gestures, sudden shifts, and textural collisions push the source material to its limits. Tracks expand and contract unpredictably, as if testing how far a melody can be stretched before it ceases to be itself.

Across all three discs, what holds the project together is not a consistent sound but a consistent attitude: refusal. Refusal to fix the material in a single identity, refusal to resolve tensions between past and present, refusal to treat tradition as either sacred or disposable.

The core ensemble - Patrick Hengst, Ludger Schmidt, Martin Verborg, and Manuela Weichenrieder - operates less like a backing band and more like a flexible organism. Their role shifts constantly, sometimes leading, sometimes dissolving into the texture, sometimes acting as a hinge between radically different approaches. Weichenrieder’s voice, in particular, functions as a kind of thread, not anchoring the music but keeping it from dispersing entirely.

What’s striking is how little nostalgia there is. Despite drawing from songs that date back to the 16th century, "Sephardic Dialogues" avoids the usual reverence. Instead, it treats history as something active, unstable, occasionally contradictory. The past isn’t reconstructed; it’s re-experienced under altered conditions.

Of course, this approach comes with risks. Not every transition feels seamless, and at times the sheer variety of methods can border on fragmentation. But smoothness was never the goal. The project gains more from its friction than it would from coherence.
Released by Umland Records, this three-disc set feels less like a definitive statement and more like an open process - one that happens to have been documented with unusual care.

If there’s a unifying idea, it’s hidden in plain sight: dialogue implies difference. And difference, here, is not something to be resolved. It’s something to be sustained.

Three discs, multiple voices, no final agreement. Which, considering the subject matter, might be the most faithful outcome imaginable.