Fleeting touches like threads that cross, linger, and come undone, a memory: Ephemeral Fragments, est. 2019. Emily Wittbrodt, Florian Walter and Korhan Erel meet the factor of time with surgical mindfulness. Vibrations of cello, tubax and electronics shift streamlined between overlay and grand pause: electroacoustic chamber music with a Deep Listening twist. Undertow-like in the arrangements and tradition-spanning in the instrumentation, an ambivalent form of storytelling is created, one that gently tears you out of the dream rather than seducing you into dreaming. The aesthetic sweet spot and its summoning, always healing and disillusioning at once, carries the same relevance as its dramaturgical unlocking. Symbiosis and confrontation no longer form opposites, but share the same right to exist on a plateau of creative intentionlessness. Structured meandering between Instant Composing and conceptual sound art: a work-in-progress distilled into an impromptu.
Hybridization as leitmotif, never monothematic, but always eclectic. As with their tools, so too their backgrounds, united under the flourishing umbrella of Creative Music, a definition of jazz known for its artistic openness, one that grasps not only its roots but the creative act itself as the key to innovation.
Emily Wittbrodt pursues a decidedly chamber-musical understanding of Modern Creative, one that stylishly thinks European art music together with song structures beyond genre affiliation. The melodicism of her violoncello strikes the audience straight in the subconscious. Vulnerability and clarity meet eye to eye as parameters of one and the same sovereign handwriting, thereby becoming both anchor of calm and driving force within the self-effective cosmos of Ephemeral Fragments.
Reduced to the maximum: at the other end of the spectrum, saxophonist Florian Walter turns to the tubax, a modified contrabass saxophone with a baritone mouthpiece. Equally foundation and pinnacle, it pumps and snorts as dynamic transients erupt, spiking up out of bulbous, sonorous drones. With visceral primal force, the bass locomotive forges its way through a sinewy tangle of chirping live electronics and lyrical cello cascades, only to grow with them, in the very next moment, into one abstract sound body. Grounding through counterbalance, as a necessary organelle of a self-contained system.
Here too, only a narrow ridge separates free improvisation from experimental music, and so the synergies of Wittbrodt and Walter, both jazz-socialized in North Rhine-Westphalia, extend all the way to Berlin, where Korhan Erel, as an integral part of the electronic avant-garde, shifts the boundaries between real-time music, performance and contemporary composition. Blink once and the chamber play turns into a Chamber Grotesque: digital oscillations form the ether that osmotically permeates cello and tubax, turning the dojo into a hot-cold hall of mirrors that confronts everyone and everything with itself. Organic matter electrified by Erel’s fingerprint, like a pulsating gramophone that begins to hum before revealing itself as an unidentified flying object. Transformative, outlandish, nonconforming.
With the greatest sensitivity, Emily Wittbrodt, Florian Walter and Korhan Erel thus manifest a subversive form of artistic reductionism, one that never aims at pure contemplation but charmingly invites active listening instead. Conceptual framing narratives and improvisational skills interlock with virtuosity, letting the full potential of the trio-pyramid become fully experienceable on both a sensory and an intellectual level. Its modular character predestines Ephemeral Fragments for scene-crossing encounters and audiophile settings in immediate proximity to its equally heterogeneous audiences. The classic binary of concert hall and jazz club can finally be overcome: literally out-of-the-box, through the magic of electroacoustic entanglement, fragmentarily shimmering between gallery, club and factory hall. An open book as an invitation outward, for a story of brief happiness.
– Text by Louis Rastig