There is something almost suspiciously sensible about the title "Independent / Interdependent". Improvisers are supposed to be independent, after all: three people entering a room with their own histories, techniques, instincts and egos, presumably agreeing not to strangle one another with a metronome. But independence in improvisation is never quite as simple as doing your own thing. The moment another musician makes a sound, your own sound has acquired a context. You can ignore it, resist it, answer it, absorb it or completely misinterpret it. In the best cases, you do all five.

"Independent / Interdependent", recorded live at Thessaloniki’s Mikri Skini during the Take 2 Festival in March 2025, is a particularly compelling demonstration of this unstable social contract. Savina Yannatou, Gonçalo Almeida and Costis Drygianakis do not behave like a conventional trio, and certainly do not seem interested in establishing the usual hierarchy of voice, accompaniment and decoration. Instead, they continually alter the distance between themselves. Sometimes three separate sound-generating organisms can be heard quite clearly; elsewhere they seem to dissolve into a single, slowly mutating body. The interesting thing is that neither condition ever feels permanent.

Yannatou is perhaps the most immediately recognisable presence, although “voice” is almost an inadequate description of what she does here. Her long engagement with Mediterranean and Balkan traditions, early music and free improvisation has given her an unusually broad vocabulary, and she has spent decades treating singing less as the delivery system for words than as a physical resource in itself. On these four pieces, breath, resonance, grain, cry and sustained tones become materials that can coexist with the instruments without needing to be translated into melody. At times she seems to be singing; at others, the voice appears to have wandered into the electronics department and returned with its passport confiscated.

Almeida provides an equally unstable foundation. The Portuguese bassist, now based in Rotterdam, has worked across modern jazz, free improvisation, jazzcore and experimental music, with an especially developed interest in extending the double bass beyond its conventional role as provider of low frequencies and occasional stern facial expressions. His solo and collaborative work has repeatedly investigated bowing, amplification, preparation, resonance and the physical behaviour of the instrument itself. Here, his bass frequently seems less like an accompanying instrument than a large wooden machine for producing pressure, friction and uncertain gravity. A bowed note can become a drone, a scrape can suggest an approaching storm, and a resonance can remain in the room long enough to make you wonder whether the bassist has actually stopped playing.

Then there is Drygianakis, whose electroacoustic practice has long involved recording media, transformation, collage, improvisation and the manipulation of accidental relationships between sounds. His work has occupied that wonderfully unhelpful territory between composition and experiment, where randomness is not treated as a mistake but as another musician who has not been properly introduced. His processing does not simply sit on top of Yannatou and Almeida like some fashionable digital glaze. It alters their apparent scale and identity. A vocal gesture may become an atmospheric mass; the double bass may lose its obvious physical source; a tiny sound may acquire disproportionate menace.

The four titles offer an intriguing route through this process. "Auto//Syn" begins with the tension already encoded in its name: self and together, separation and conjunction. It does not rush to resolve that contradiction. Instead, the music seems to test how close three independent trajectories can come before they stop being distinguishable. Yannatou’s sounds stretch across Almeida’s dark resonances while Drygianakis introduces subtle shifts in perspective, making the listener constantly reassess what belongs to whom.

"Synapse" pushes the idea further. The title suggests a connection that is also a gap, because a synapse is precisely the tiny interval across which information has to travel. That makes it an apt metaphor for free improvisation. Communication here is never instantaneous or guaranteed. A gesture is made, somebody catches it, somebody else distorts it, and the result becomes the next piece of information. The music consequently feels less like a conversation in which everybody politely waits for their turn than like a nervous system discovering itself while already operating.

"Auto_Nomos" is perhaps the most conceptually mischievous title of the four. “Autonomous” ultimately derives from the idea of governing oneself, of having one’s own law. And that is almost exactly what the musicians do. Each develops according to an internal logic, but none is operating in isolation. The bass has its laws, the voice has hers, the electronics have their own peculiar constitution. The achievement lies in allowing those laws to collide without turning the collision into a battle for sovereignty.

The closing "Synklisis" feels like the natural consequence. Rather than simply presenting “independence” and “interdependence” as opposing philosophical camps, the album discovers that they are conditions constantly producing one another. The closer does not sound like three musicians finally agreeing on something. It sounds more like three distinct lines gradually finding that they can occupy the same space without surrendering their identities.

This is also why the record's darkness is more interesting than the word might initially suggest. There is little interest in atmospheric gloom for its own sake. The darkness comes from uncertainty, from not always knowing where one sound ends and another begins, from the physical sensation of listening to forms being negotiated in real time. There are moments of remarkable stillness, but they never feel empty. Silence here has the slightly menacing quality of somebody thinking before answering.

What makes "Independent / Interdependent" particularly satisfying is its refusal to confuse freedom with randomness. Free improvisation can sometimes resemble three people throwing furniture down a staircase and then calling the resulting noise “process”. Yannatou, Almeida and Drygianakis understand that genuine freedom requires attention. Every sound has consequences. A tiny vocal inflection can redirect the bass; a bow stroke can change the electronic environment; a processed fragment can provoke a completely new response. Structure therefore appears retrospectively, as something discovered rather than imposed.

There is a philosophical point hiding inside all this. Independence is often imagined as the absence of others, whereas interdependence is sometimes treated as a loss of individuality. This music proposes something considerably less tidy: perhaps individuality becomes most audible when it has something else to react against. The self is not erased by connection. It becomes legible through it.

That makes the album a remarkably apt document of improvisation, but also a quietly persuasive model of collaboration itself. Nobody wins. Nobody disappears. Nobody gets to be the boss of the noise. The three musicians simply keep adjusting their position relative to one another until the music discovers a shape that none of them could have produced alone.

And that may be the most convincing argument "Independent / Interdependent" makes. Independence is not the opposite of connection. Sometimes it is the thing that makes meaningful connection possible.

The result deliberately leans more toward interaction, listening, linguistic structure and philosophical tension than toward the usual free-improv vocabulary of “soundscapes”, “journeys” and “immersive sonic landscapes”, which has probably been responsible for more dead trees than the logging industry.