There are bands that play loud, bands that play fast, and bands that apparently regard the distinction between composition and controlled demolition as an unnecessary bureaucratic obstacle. (Exit) Knarr belongs to the third category. On "fly", recorded at Oslo's Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene at the end of the European tour that followed "Drops", Ingebrigt Håker Flaten's sextet takes material associated with both "Drops" and "Breezy" and subjects it to the peculiar logic of a band that has spent enough time together to stop behaving like a band and start behaving like a single, mildly unstable creature.

This matters because "fly" is not simply the obligatory live album with a little extra perspiration left on the microphones. The pieces have changed. Fragments from earlier compositions have been absorbed into new structures, familiar ideas have acquired different proportions, and the musicians seem increasingly interested in what happens after a composition has stopped being something to reproduce. The result is a record that occupies an awkward and fertile territory between repertoire and improvisation.

Flaten is hardly a newcomer to awkward territories. The Norwegian bassist has spent decades moving between free jazz, improvised music and more formally organised projects, with credits that include The Thing, Atomic, School Days, Free Fall and collaborations with figures such as Joe McPhee, Evan Parker and Håkon Kornstad. His reputation as an extraordinarily active sideman might actually obscure one of his more interesting qualities: he is a composer who understands that a score doesn't necessarily have to tell musicians what to do. Sometimes it has to give them something sufficiently sturdy to attack.

(Exit) Knarr, originally assembled for Vossa Jazz in 2021, has become the ideal vehicle for that philosophy. Previous records already established a peculiar equilibrium between written material, collective freedom, rock propulsion, electronics and the abrasive possibilities of free improvisation. "Breezy" demonstrated how sharply the group could move between melody and eruption, while "Drops" pushed further into graphic-score territory and gave electronics a more prominent role without allowing them to sterilise the human component of the music.

"fly" sounds like the next logical consequence: stop treating those compositions as fixed objects and see what they become when repeatedly thrown into the air.

The opening title piece lasts nearly thirteen minutes, and it earns its duration by refusing the usual dramaturgy of “quiet bit, loud bit, enormous solo, everyone goes home”. The six musicians constantly redistribute the weight. Amalie Dahl's alto and baritone saxophones and Karl Hjalmar Nyberg's tenor occupy different parts of the horn spectrum, sometimes forming a muscular front line, sometimes behaving more like competing weather systems. Marta Warelis can make the piano sound sharply architectural before allowing it to dissolve into the ensemble. Jonathan F. Horne brings a guitar vocabulary that has never seemed particularly interested in respecting the traditional border between jazz and noise. Olaf Olsen supplies the crucial physical momentum, while Flaten's double bass is frequently less a foreground voice than the load-bearing structure on which everyone else can perform acts of vandalism.

That last distinction is important. Flaten's bass playing here is not constantly demanding attention, because he doesn't need it. He creates movement by controlling density, repetition and gravity. When the band accelerates, the acceleration feels collective rather than decorative. When it suddenly withdraws, the silence seems to have been negotiated rather than merely left behind.

Then "breezy" arrives, carrying the ghost of the earlier album but refusing to behave like a reprise. The title has an unavoidable personal resonance, since the original composition was connected to Flaten's late friend and collaborator Jaimie Branch, whose music and attitude clearly remain part of the emotional background of the project. Yet the tribute is not treated as a solemn monument. Earlier versions of "Breezy" already balanced exuberance and elegy, moving through blues-inflected passages, spiritual-jazz colours and more unruly free-jazz terrain.

On "fly", the piece feels less like remembrance carved into stone and more like memory being handled by living musicians. That difference is considerable. The music doesn't freeze Branch into a historical figure. It keeps moving, which is probably the more appropriate form of tribute for an artist whose work was so invested in motion, collision and refusal.

The thirteen-minute "austin birds" is perhaps the clearest indication that this isn't merely a concert souvenir. The title recalls Flaten's Austin environment, but the music doesn't settle into postcard territory. Instead, the ensemble builds a strange geography out of short gestures, horn exchanges, rhythmic disruptions and increasingly unstable interactions. There is melody here, but it behaves like something overheard through several walls.

The group's greatest strength is its ability to make abrupt changes feel earned. A horn figure can become a rhythmic device; a guitar attack can function almost like percussion; Warelis' piano can suddenly turn a dense passage transparent. Electronics are used not as futuristic wallpaper but as another means of damaging the edges of the acoustic instruments. This is particularly revealing given the direction "Drops" had already taken, where electronic processing and graphic notation expanded the band's possibilities without replacing its acoustic core.

And then there is "chaos pad", which has the sort of title that could either be an accurate description or something written on a sticky note five minutes before rehearsal. Here it is both.

The six musicians sound as though they have discovered that chaos is actually quite difficult to achieve properly. Randomness is easy. Genuine instability requires architecture. The piece continually approaches collapse without quite falling into it, maintaining enough rhythmic and compositional information for the listener to sense an underlying design even when the surface becomes gloriously unruly.

This is one of the reasons "fly" feels different from a generic free-jazz blowout. There is plenty of force, certainly, but force isn't the point. Flaten's compositions provide frameworks that can survive being stretched. The band can rip into them, loosen them, fragment them and apparently set fire to the furniture while still retaining a sense of where the walls are.

That balance has been recognised in reactions to both "Breezy" and "Drops": critics have repeatedly pointed to the group's capacity to combine free-jazz intensity with grooves, formal structures and moments of surprising lyricism. The electronics may roughen the picture, but they don't flatten the acoustic musicians into a homogeneous electronic mass.

The live setting makes this quality more obvious because there is nowhere for the music to hide. Studio production can create the illusion of coherence after the fact; a stage has considerably less patience. Here, the coherence is generated in real time.

There is also something almost old-fashioned about the physicality of it. You can hear musicians listening, reacting, leaving space, occupying it again and occasionally behaving as though somebody has removed the emergency brake. The sophistication comes not from restraint but from knowing exactly how much pressure the structure can take before it becomes something else.

That is perhaps the central idea of "fly": transformation without erasure. The compositions from "Breezy" and "Drops" remain somewhere inside these performances, but in much the same way that a tree remains inside a wooden table. The original material has been cut, rearranged and given another function. It is still recognisable if you know where to look, but it has acquired a different life.

Flaten's achievement as a bandleader is therefore not simply that he has assembled six exceptionally capable improvisers. Plenty of people have done that, sometimes with results resembling a meeting where everyone has been given a microphone. His achievement is giving these musicians enough structure to generate collective identity without suffocating their individual instincts.

Amalie Dahl can be fierce without merely becoming “the saxophone soloist”. Nyberg can introduce electronics without turning the group into an electronic project. Warelis can disrupt the harmonic field without abandoning it. Horne can scrape and slash at the music without making noise itself the destination. Olsen can propel the entire mechanism while knowing when not to. Flaten holds all of this together with a bassist's particular understanding of weight: what must remain solid, what can move, and what can be allowed to fall.

The title "fly" consequently feels less like an instruction than a description of what happens when the music has accumulated enough momentum to leave the ground.

It doesn't float. It doesn't glide. It takes off. And when it does, (Exit) Knarr demonstrates that sophisticated ensemble playing need not look sophisticated from a distance. Sometimes it looks like six people making an extraordinarily convincing argument for why the furniture should be moved out of the way.

"fly" is a live album, technically speaking. In practice, it is something more interesting: a snapshot of compositions in transit, caught between their previous identities and whatever they may become next. The music remembers where it came from, but it has no particular interest in going back.

That is probably why the record feels so alive. It isn't documenting a finished thing. It is documenting a band discovering, in public, that its own music is still capable of changing shape.

Christian Prommer has spent enough time moving between jazz, broken beat, techno and club music to make genre boundaries look less like walls than badly maintained suggestions. As a member of Fauna Flash and Trüby Trio, through Voom:Voom with Peter Kruder, and later with Drumlesson, he has repeatedly taken electronic music apart and rebuilt it with musicians who know that rhythm is not simply something you put underneath a tune. "Rhythmique Nocturne", his first solo album in more than a decade, continues that practice without sounding like a retrospective exercise. Instead, it feels like the work of somebody who has accumulated three decades of musical habits and finally decided to let them all talk at once, preferably after midnight.

The central idea is deceptively simple: make the acoustic instrument behave badly. Prommer begins with piano, drums, percussion, strings, cello and Rhodes, then subjects them to electronic procedures, amplification, preparation, sampling and rhythmic displacement until their conventional identities start becoming negotiable. The opening title track is almost a manifesto in miniature. A prepared upright piano is struck, scraped and dampened until its wooden body begins supplying percussion as much as harmony, while a restrained TB-303 pulse lurks underneath. The result does not sound like someone demonstrating what can be done to a piano. It sounds like a pianist who has discovered that the furniture has opinions.

That physical approach is one of the album’s greatest strengths. “Black Mamba” pushes the prepared piano through distortion and pedals, turning its familiar tonal organisation into something more ambiguous and abrasive. “Dark Matter” is built around live congas and drums while synthesizers gradually increase the pressure without ever quite exploding. The latter is particularly effective because Prommer understands that restraint is not the absence of energy. Sometimes the most convincing way to make a track feel dangerous is to keep refusing it the obvious climax. The kick drum waits, the synths mutate, the percussion insists, and the whole thing develops the slightly sinister patience of an animal that has noticed you are carrying food.

Prommer’s biography makes this balance between rhythmic instinct and studio construction less surprising. Born in Munich in 1969, he emerged from Germany’s early-1990s electronic scene and helped establish the jazz-inflected, broken-beat side of Compost’s catalogue through Fauna Flash and Trüby Trio. His later Drumlesson project famously reworked techno and house repertoire with an acoustic jazz ensemble, reversing the usual direction of adaptation. Rather than taking jazz and adding electronic decoration, he repeatedly asks what happens when the physicality of a jazz ensemble is allowed to invade electronic music. "Rhythmique Nocturne" sounds like a mature continuation of that question rather than another attempt to prove that genres can coexist.

“Night Society” may be the album’s most elaborate demonstration of the method. Its electronic skeleton grows out of a Juno-60 idea reinterpreted through prepared piano, then expands into eighteen strings, harmonium, cello, Mini-Moog and percussion. What could easily have become expensive-sounding wallpaper instead retains a sense of rhythmic purpose. The strings do not simply announce that this is now the sophisticated part of the record. They become another moving component inside the groove. This is where Prommer’s experience as both drummer and producer becomes especially useful: arrangement is treated as something kinetic. Every new layer has to alter the motion of the piece, not merely increase its budget.

The vocal tracks provide another kind of contrast. “I Am Falling (Falling Deep)” places Carl Justin inside a murky mixture of trip-hop, acid bass and jazz harmony, while “Struck”, featuring Leona Berlin, slows the pulse into a darker, more spacious piece in which Fender Rhodes, strings, bass and voice occupy a surprisingly smoky territory. Neither track feels bolted on to provide the album with a conventional song format. The voices become additional textures with personalities, capable of making the machinery feel suddenly intimate. “I Lost Myself in the Music”, closing the album, takes that intimacy even further, keeping the drums at a distance and allowing a soft arpeggio and vocals to suggest that the dancefloor can occasionally produce something resembling private reflection. The sentiment is potentially dangerous territory, since electronic music has already supplied humanity with enough opportunities to become embarrassingly sincere. Prommer gets away with it because the arrangement remains understated.

“Tryin’ Times” is perhaps the most politically charged piece, but its interest lies less in its message than in the act of musical memory behind it. Prommer takes Roberta Flack’s 1969 recording and reconstructs it through looping, fragmentation and a contemporary jazz-rave framework, with Justine Hoerwarth providing the vocal presence and Mosés Yoofee adding piano. The track connects protest soul to club culture without pretending that the two belong to identical historical circumstances. The inherited song remains recognisable as a source of emotional and political weight, while the production turns that inheritance into something restless rather than reverential. There is an important distinction here: Prommer is not polishing an old message for contemporary consumption; he is testing whether its urgency can survive a different rhythmic body.

Then there is “Algorhythmic”, which offers perhaps the clearest glimpse of Prommer the sound designer. Built from a chain of arpeggiators and chord resonators, with archival recordings of drummer Billy Hart incorporated into the structure, it sets programmed processes against minute human variations. The interesting part is not the familiar fantasy of “man versus machine”, which has been exhausted by approximately seventeen million electronic-music press releases. It is the opposite: the machine becomes interesting because the human material prevents its repetitions from remaining perfectly obedient. Rhythm becomes a negotiation between prediction and interruption.

“Spiral” takes this principle to an almost absurd degree, constructing its harmonic and textural material from a single cymbal. It is a wonderfully Prommer-like conceit because the source is so limited while the resulting field is not. Attack becomes tone, decay becomes atmosphere, metallic resonance becomes rhythmic information. The piece demonstrates that sampling can be more than collecting objects from the outside world. It can mean taking one physical event apart until its hidden components become an entire vocabulary. There is a small philosophical pleasure in that: nothing needs to be added if you have listened closely enough to what was already there.

“Bosss”, the tribute to Joe Zawinul, brings another strand of Prommer’s musical history into focus. Recorded live with Kelvin Sholar on piano and Rhodes, it carries the looseness of fusion without reproducing its period mannerisms. Zawinul is less a stylistic template here than a reminder of what happens when electronic thinking, improvisation and rhythmic sophistication are allowed to occupy the same room. Prommer’s own career has repeatedly operated in precisely that territory, from his work with electronic groups to Drumlesson and collaborations across jazz and dance music. His skill is not really in making unlike things resemble one another. It is in discovering which underlying principles they already share.

The album’s real achievement, then, is not that it successfully combines jazz, house, techno, trip-hop, soul and experimental electronics. That description sounds impressive until one remembers that modern music has been combining everything with everything for decades, often with the enthusiasm of a supermarket blender. "Rhythmique Nocturne" is more convincing because the connections are physical. A piano can become percussion. A cymbal can become harmony. A string section can function rhythmically. A drum recording can destabilise an algorithm. A sample from the past can become a contemporary gesture rather than a museum label. Prommer understands these relationships from the inside, as a drummer, producer and arranger who has spent years moving between rooms that supposedly belong to different musical tribes.

There is consequently very little sense of genre tourism here. The album does not visit jazz, techno or deep house as exotic neighbourhoods before returning home. These languages have clearly been part of Prommer’s musical vocabulary for years, and he uses them with the relaxed confidence of someone who no longer needs to explain why they belong together. The result is tactile without being fetishistic, sophisticated without becoming precious, and dance-oriented without treating the listener as a pair of legs requiring instructions. "Rhythmique Nocturne" ultimately proposes something rather more interesting than a fusion of styles: it suggests that rhythm itself can be a meeting place, provided we stop insisting on checking everyone’s passport at the door.

There is something wonderfully unreasonable about a band releasing its 27th full-length album and deciding that what the world really needs is not simplification, consolidation or a dignified summing-up, but another large, unruly organism capable of occupying an entire hour without once apologising for its appetite. CHEER-ACCIDENT have been doing this sort of thing since 1981, when Thymme Jones helped turn a name spotted in a Hallmark greeting-card display into one of Chicago's most stubbornly individual musical institutions. Since then the band's personnel have continually shifted, while Jones and guitarist Jeff Libersher have remained among the central figures in a practice that has moved freely between art-rock, progressive music, pop, noise, improvisation and the sort of compositional mischief that makes genre labels look like forms someone forgot to submit. "You Smile – The Song Is Over" does not attempt to tidy any of that history. It gleefully makes more of it.

The opening “Episode 34” is almost a warning disguised as an introduction: four and a half minutes are enough to establish that conventional song architecture will be treated here as a useful suggestion rather than a legal requirement. Then “Behind Your Smile” expands into a twelve-minute construction whose melodic passages, instrumental density and gradual changes of perspective suggest a band perfectly comfortable with taking its time, provided that time remains sufficiently populated. “They Won't Talk To Me” pushes the principle further, accumulating voices, winds, rhythm-section movement and abrupt changes in emphasis until the piece seems to contain several competing versions of itself. The presence of John Bruce Yeh, assistant principal clarinet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is particularly telling: the clarinet does not arrive as some tasteful classical ornament placed on top of a rock arrangement, but as another active colour in an already overcrowded palette.

That overcrowding is actually one of the album's great strengths. CHEER-ACCIDENT understand density differently from bands that simply pile things on. Instruments are frequently allowed to retain their own personalities, so that guitar, piano, drums, horns, strings, keyboards, percussion and voices can collide without necessarily being reduced to a single block of "big sound." The result is closer to a complicated conversation in which everyone has been given permission to interrupt. “The Next Fog” and “Incoming Angles” compress this appetite into miniature forms, while the seven-second “Moon Homecoming” is almost a practical joke at the centre of an otherwise lavishly furnished house. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient way of reminding us that duration is not the same thing as importance.

The longer pieces are where the band's peculiar balance between composition and instability becomes most persuasive. “Tin Pan Galaxy” can flirt with something approaching conventional melodic pleasure before CHEER-ACCIDENT begin moving the furniture around. “Graffiti Eyes” generates a nervous forward pull without surrendering its compositional control, while “The Blue Lie” is perhaps the album's most convincing demonstration of how much can happen inside a single extended form without turning the music into a mere catalogue of events. There is always a recognisable intention underneath the eccentricity. Even when the arrangements appear to be multiplying in different directions, the music retains an almost suspicious sense of proportion.

This is partly what distinguishes CHEER-ACCIDENT from the more predictable varieties of avant-prog. Their eccentricity is not based on permanent ugliness, nor on the assumption that difficulty automatically equals seriousness. They can be angular without worshipping angularity, sophisticated without sounding as though they have recently discovered the word "sophisticated," and funny without converting every musical decision into a gag. There are moments here where the band's fondness for pop, orchestral colour and straightforward emotional communication becomes just as important as the fractured rhythms and elaborate structures. The title itself carries that contradiction: "You Smile – The Song Is Over" sounds simultaneously affectionate and faintly threatening, as though somebody has just announced the end of the party while quietly plugging another amplifier into the wall.

The final stretch of the studio album makes that ambiguity particularly effective. “Absence Moving Backwards” creates a more spacious, reflective atmosphere, and “Epilogue” refuses the usual temptation to treat the word "epilogue" as an instruction to disappear politely. Then comes an edited version of “They Won't Talk To Me”, which makes the whole sequence feel less like a conventional conclusion than like a return to a previously visited room, except that the furniture has moved. CHEER-ACCIDENT are unusually good at this sort of circular thinking: endings become modifications of beginnings, fragments acquire retrospective weight, and a supposedly finished composition leaves behind the irritating suspicion that it might have another trick hidden somewhere.

The deluxe edition's DVD is consequently more important than the phrase "bonus material" would suggest. The two Chicago concerts, recorded at CheerAx Basement in 2022 and Reggie's in 2023, document the first officially released live performances in the group's history and reveal another side of the CHEER-ACCIDENT principle. On stage, the floating membership becomes a feature rather than a biographical footnote. The expanded personnel allow older material and newer arrangements to breathe differently, with guitars, brass, keyboards, percussion and multiple voices creating a much more physical version of the band's compositional logic. The CheerAx set moves through pieces such as “Learning How To Fly”, “Drag You Down,” “Humanizing The Distance” and “Even Has a Half-Life”, while the Reggie's performance ranges through “Heaven”, “Failure”, “You Know, You Know”, “Crazy” and an appropriately named “Improv”. Hearing these performances after the studio record makes the latter seem less like an elaborately constructed object and more like one possible configuration of a much larger musical ecosystem.

There is also something quietly impressive about the fact that a band formed in the early 1980s can still sound less interested in preserving its identity than in testing it. CHEER-ACCIDENT's history contains abrasive avant-rock, meticulously arranged pop, progressive complexity, improvisation, absurdist performance and numerous changes of personnel, but "You Smile – The Song Is Over" does not behave like an archive of those achievements. It behaves like a present-tense band record. The musicians are not demonstrating that they remember how to be CHEER-ACCIDENT. They are demonstrating that they still have no particularly strong desire to find out what that would mean.

Perhaps that is why the album's title is so apt. The song is over, apparently. Except there is another track, then another concert, then another version, then another turn in the arrangement, and eventually the whole thing has lasted long enough for the distinction between endurance and pleasure to become pleasantly unreliable. Some records ask for attention. This one keeps manufacturing reasons for attention to become impossible to withdraw. In an age devoted to shortening everything, CHEER-ACCIDENT have made an hour-long argument for excess, patience and the continuing usefulness of having far too many ideas at once. Human civilisation has survived worse strategies.

Improvised music sometimes gets described as though the musicians have simply agreed to remove the safety rails and see what happens. "Critical Values" suggests something more demanding: three experienced players meeting for the first time and discovering, in real time, which sounds can survive contact with one another. Tiziana Bertoncini’s violin, Jonas Kocher’s accordion and Thomas Lehn’s analogue synthesizer and processing do not form a conventional trio so much as a small laboratory in which acoustic identity is repeatedly placed under pressure. The laboratory happens to have microphones, and thankfully nobody is wearing a white coat.

The recording comes from a single encounter at La Voirie in Biel/Bienne on 17 September 2025, divided into just two pieces, “Complex Plane” and “Bifurcation Points”, lasting roughly twenty-three and twenty minutes respectively. Nothing has been edited or rearranged afterwards. That decision matters because the music depends on the gradual accumulation of microscopic reactions. It is not trying to give the impression of spontaneity. It actually preserves the consequences of spontaneity, including the moments when an idea has to be abandoned because another sound has unexpectedly changed the conditions around it.

Bertoncini and Lehn bring a particularly long history of musical conversation to the meeting. They have worked together since the early 2000s, developing a language in which her classically trained violin can become brittle, granular, skeletal or strangely vocal while Lehn’s analogue electronics respond not merely by accompanying it but by transforming its acoustic implications. Bertoncini’s background is unusually divided between music and visual art: after classical violin studies she also studied painting, and that visual dimension has remained part of her wider practice through installations and interdisciplinary projects. It is tempting to describe her playing in visual terms, therefore, but the more interesting thing is that she often seems to manipulate density and contour as though sound had physical edges.

Lehn has an equally distinctive history. Trained in piano and sound engineering, he has worked with analogue synthesizer systems since the late 1980s and has become one of the central figures in European live electronics, collaborating with musicians ranging from free improvisers to composers of rigorously notated experimental music. His electronics here are particularly effective because they rarely behave like an ornamental electronic layer placed underneath the violin and accordion. They alter the apparent material of the other instruments. A violin attack can become a residue; an accordion tone can acquire a metallic shadow; a tiny acoustic gesture can return with its dimensions quietly rearranged.

Kocher enters this established dyad as the destabilising third presence, although “destabilising” should not be mistaken for “chaotic”. The accordion is an instrument with an unfortunate public-relations problem: it arrives carrying decades of folk clichés, cabaret associations and the faint possibility of someone requesting a waltz. Kocher has spent years dismantling that baggage through improvisation, composition and interdisciplinary work, and here the instrument is treated primarily as a generator of pressure, friction, breath and resonance. Its familiar identity is still present, but it is increasingly difficult to locate.

“Complex Plane” develops through precisely this uncertainty. The opening does not announce a hierarchy. Instead, sounds seem to test their own boundaries, appearing as isolated events before gradually entering relationships with the others. Bertoncini can produce a narrow, almost threadlike violin presence, while Kocher introduces unstable pneumatic textures and Lehn expands or contaminates the acoustic information. The piece advances without conventional rhythmic propulsion, yet it is never static. Its movement occurs through changes in density, duration, register and response. One sound causes another to alter its behaviour, and suddenly what seemed like three independent streams has become a single unstable mechanism.

The title “Complex Plane” is particularly apt without requiring a mathematical lecture, for which everyone should be grateful. The music seems to operate through coordinates that are constantly being recalculated. A sound is not simply high or low, loud or quiet, acoustic or electronic. Its significance depends on what the other instruments are doing at that precise moment. A thin violin squeak can become substantial when surrounded by near-silence; an apparently massive electronic tone can become almost weightless when the violin cuts across it. Scale is therefore psychological rather than fixed.

“Bifurcation Points” is more restless. Its sounds appear to approach thresholds, hesitate and then split into different directions. The accordion becomes especially useful here because its physical mechanism already contains a peculiar contradiction: air produces sound, but the player can manipulate that airflow with almost absurdly fine control. Kocher exploits the instrument's capacity for pressure and interruption, while Bertoncini's violin supplies another kind of instability, moving between recognisable instrumental gestures and sounds that seem to have escaped from the instrument before anyone could identify them.

Lehn’s role is crucial in keeping this from becoming a mere catalogue of extended techniques. His processing creates relationships between sounds rather than simply making them more unusual. At times the electronics appear to enlarge microscopic details until they acquire their own environment; elsewhere they remain almost hidden, changing the listener’s perception without announcing their presence. The effect is less “electronic versus acoustic” than a continual uncertainty about where one ends and the other begins.

There is also something refreshingly physical about the recording. Despite the sophistication of the players, "Critical Values" never sounds like a demonstration of specialist knowledge. You can hear musicians listening, withholding, testing, retreating and returning. Silence becomes an active participant rather than a decorative pause, and individual gestures acquire importance because nobody rushes to fill the space after them. This is one of the reasons the uninterrupted nature of the performance works so well. The music retains its little hesitations and changes of direction, the places where thought can almost be heard happening.

The album's most compelling achievement is consequently not any particular unusual sound. It is the creation of a situation in which sounds are allowed to change their identity through proximity. The violin does not remain “the violin”, the accordion does not remain “the accordion”, and the synthesizer does not simply stand on the other side of an imaginary technological border. Each instrument becomes a set of possibilities that the others continually reshape.

That process also explains why "Critical Values" rewards attention without demanding reverence. It is austere in materials but surprisingly rich in incident. The music does not decorate its ideas, and it does not tell the listener where the important moment is supposed to occur. Instead, importance emerges retrospectively: a tiny noise heard several minutes earlier suddenly makes sense because the trio has moved somewhere else.

Perhaps that is the real meaning of the album's title. The critical value is not a particular point on a graph but the instant when a sound stops behaving as expected. A violin ceases to sound like a violin. An accordion becomes an acoustic machine. An electronic pulse acquires something almost tactile. Three musicians who have never previously made this exact conversation discover that the most interesting territory lies neither in agreement nor conflict, but in the unstable region where one sound forces another to reconsider what it is.

For forty-four minutes, "Critical Values" keeps returning to that region without settling it. No grand climax is required. The experiment works because nobody tries to prove that it has worked. The music simply keeps changing the conditions under which its own sounds can exist, which is perhaps the most convincing form of improvisational intelligence: not knowing what comes next, but being sufficiently attentive to recognise it when it arrives.

Julien Gasc has always seemed slightly suspicious of the idea that a song should behave itself. On "Perles, coraux & requins", his fifth solo album, he gives that suspicion an aquatic setting: beneath the turbulence of ordinary life, somewhere between romantic fantasy, private melancholy and mildly surreal observation, he goes diving. The result is an album that treats French chanson less as a tradition to be preserved than as a strange little animal that can still be taught some new tricks.

Gasc’s background makes the record’s peculiar balance easier to understand. A founding member of Aquaserge, he has also worked with Stereolab, while his solo catalogue has gradually moved between psychedelic pop, intimate songwriting, experimental arrangements and the more eccentric corners of French song. He is a multi-instrumentalist in the literal sense rather than the promotional sense: here he handles voice, guitar, bass, organ, synthesizers, Mellotron and drum machine, constructing a remarkably detailed environment around songs that often sound deceptively simple. His musical vocabulary draws on Brazilian songwriters such as João Gilberto and Chico Buarque, but also on the more elusive tradition of French pop in which melody, verbal absurdity and arrangement can coexist without asking permission from one another.

The Berlin circumstances add another layer of intrigue. Anton Newcombe recorded the album over three sessions between 2023 and 2024, contributing synthesizers, Mellotron and percussion, while Tim Gane adds guitar and Leo Blomov provides arrangements. It is an unusually convincing meeting because Newcombe’s psychedelic sensibility does not turn Gasc into another BJM satellite, nor does Gane merely arrive to provide an instantly recognisable Stereolab signature. Instead, the production gives the songs a slightly skewed depth, allowing apparently modest gestures to acquire strange afterimages. There is plenty of studio detail here, but very little of the modern obsession with polishing every surface until the music looks frightened of being touched.

“Rosen montag” immediately establishes Gasc’s peculiar relationship with rhythm and melody. His singing can sound languid without being passive, as though the words are arriving a fraction later than the music and have decided not to apologise. “Chez Martine” takes that quality further, with Tim Gane’s guitar adding a subtle foreign body to the chanson framework. The song seems simultaneously domestic and elsewhere, which is one of Gasc’s more useful tricks: he can make an ordinary name, place or gesture feel as though it has been lifted from a half-remembered film whose plot nobody bothered to explain.

The album becomes more bodily as it proceeds. “Le goût de tes lèvres” and “C’est dans le corps” bring desire closer to the skin, but Gasc avoids the usual vocabulary of grand romantic declaration. His sensuality is less polished than curious, interested in the awkwardness of inhabiting a body that keeps producing inconvenient emotions. “Plongeon de haut vol” pushes this further by shifting perspective beyond the solitary male narrator. The song’s emotional weight comes partly from this attempt to inhabit another person’s experience, turning the underwater metaphor into something more serious than an attractive bit of album decoration.

Then there is “16”, where the arrangements become especially important. Blomov’s contribution gives the piece a carefully constructed harmonic architecture, but Gasc never lets the arrangement become pompous. This is perhaps the central achievement of "Perles, coraux & requins": sophistication is everywhere, yet sophistication rarely announces itself wearing a name badge. Even the more elaborate passages retain the slightly crooked charm of someone making pop music while refusing to forget that pop music can be wonderfully strange.

“Patrick”, the album’s sole composition not written by Gasc, fits surprisingly well into this universe. Rather than functioning as an obvious detour, it becomes another piece in the album’s collection of romantic and absurdist fragments. “Je t’aime bel et bien” is more direct, but its brevity prevents the declaration from becoming monumental. Love is allowed to be sincere without being sentenced to orchestral grandeur. Livvy O’Hagan’s contribution to this and “Déguste” adds another vocal presence, and the contrast helps make the record’s interpersonal dimension more tangible.

The title track is where the underwater imagery finally becomes fully convincing. At more than five minutes, “Perles, coraux & requins” has room to let its colours accumulate: soft psychedelic electronics, melodic details, rhythmic insinuations and Gasc’s voice moving through the arrangement with an almost weightless authority. Yet the sharks are important. They prevent the album from becoming an entirely benevolent aquarium. Beauty here has teeth, desire has consequences, and introspection is not necessarily a peaceful activity. One can dive beneath the surface and still discover that the ocean contains predators. This is presumably why swimming pools have chlorine.

There is also a subtle tension between Gasc’s apparent nonchalance and the emotional material underneath it. The voice rarely sounds desperate even when the songs deal with longing, vulnerability, love or unease. That distance is not emotional coldness. It is closer to the French tradition of disguising intensity through elegance, allowing a phrase to smile while something considerably less comfortable happens underneath. The effect is particularly effective because the arrangements refuse to settle into a single mood: Mellotron haze can sit beside a drum machine, a guitar line can suddenly sharpen the texture, and the songs can drift from chanson intimacy toward psychedelic pop without announcing a change of government.

What makes "Perles, coraux & requins" ultimately more interesting than its aquatic imagery might suggest is that the sea is never really the subject. It is a way of thinking about consciousness. Above the surface there is noise, pressure, social machinery and all the ridiculous arrangements through which modern life keeps pretending to be rational. Beneath it, Gasc finds another kind of order: slower, stranger, more sensual, but certainly not free of danger. His songs inhabit that contradiction rather beautifully.

The final “Déguste” leaves the album with one last taste of its peculiar mixture of tenderness and mischief. By then, the pearls, corals and sharks have stopped functioning as symbols that need decoding. They have become inhabitants of Gasc’s private aquarium, swimming around the songs as naturally as guitars, Mellotrons and improbable French sentences.

"Perles, coraux & requins" is therefore not really an escape from the world. It is an alternative method of looking at it: from below, sideways, occasionally upside down. Gasc does not make the chaos disappear. He simply discovers that there is enough oxygen beneath it to sing.