Late Night Lab 1

Late Night Lab

Creation

Jazz and improvised music not only rely upon community, they thrive on it. While working bands are, indeed, small, self-contained communities unto themselves, the practice of improvisation has produced a truly global community where the ability to listen, respond, and communicate has brought countless musicians together with sounds as genuine lingua franca. Late Night Lab is a thrilling platform for multi-discipline collaboration that presents three self-contained trios on Friday: Kaos Puls, Mopcut, and Moskus. In this encounter, the musicians will create shifting new communities in real-time, playing this year’s Jazzfest arena for about 100 minutes. All three groups on Friday possess highly distinctive identities, and they’ll have time to share them during the programme, but the real focus is to see what happens when the action collides and overlaps.

Kaos Puls

The Swedish, Berlin-based bassist and producer Petter Eldh has displayed an extraordinarily inclusive musical sensibility, making fascinating cross-genre connections that bring pleasure, hit hard, and shed light on the musical process. He is a key collaborator of British pianist Django Bates and a cornerstone of the explosive piano trio Punkt.Vrt.Plastik with pianist Kaja Draksler and drummer Christian Lillinger, which performed at Jazzfest Berlin in 2017. This new trio with Swedish saxophonist Otis Sandsjö and Austrian drummer and synthesizer player Lukas König collides charged improvisation with sleek grooves inspired largely by the inventive productions of musicians like Jameszoo and J Dilla. Eldh has explored similar turf as the bassist and producer on Sandsjö’s excellent 2018 debut album “Y-OTIS” and as the architect behind the viscerally grooving quintet Koma Saxo, but Kaos Puls puts the beat front and centre as boundless improvisation emerges from head-nodding rhythm, rendering the club as a new platform for exploration.

 Website of Petter Eldh
 Website of Lukas König
 Website of Otis Sandsjö

Moskus Trio

German premiere

Since dropping its 2012 debut this lively, peripatetic group from Norway has playfully subverted the sound of the piano trio, ratcheting up its improvisational zeal with a concomitant sense of fun. Drummer Hans Hulbækmo (Atomic) and bassist Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson sculpt grooves that stretch, stutter, and swing, adapting organically to the expanding structures of the group’s pithy compositions, while pianist Anja Lauvdal manipulates an ever-growing arsenal of instruments to forge terse melodic phrases and succinct narrative lines. While acoustic piano remains a crucial part of her toolkit, she has begun to incorporate the sort of fizzy, pop-derived synthesizer patterns she experimented with in her duo Skrap into the Moskus sound world. The group’s most recent album “Mirakler” boldly disconnects from jazz orthodoxy in its timbre, melding the plasticity of electronics with the simple sounds of recorder or musical saw, but the trio’s sophisticated rapport thrives on in-the-moment interaction, positing rigorous internal communication within a thoroughly contemporary language.

Moskus Trio on  Soundcloud

Mopcut

German premiere

On its recent, hard-hitting debut album “Accelerated Frames of Reference” Mopcut produces a seething, herky-jerk tumult, braiding viscous electronics, snarling noise, and spasmodic grooves with the elusive vocal abstractions of Berlin-based American Audrey Chen. Together French guitarist Julien Desprez and Austrian drummer/synthesizer player Lukas König privilege a heavy improvisational ethos in their jarring, high-volume attack: sonic livewire furiously lashing the air that shape-shifts constantly. The blend of abraded noise and beats transforms and mutates, giving Chen a perpetually changing landscape for her extreme vocal-fry, ritualistic chant, and otherworldly incantation, all of which collide with, float over, and dexterously thread the harrowing output of her collaborators. All three musicians work in numerous contexts – including Chen’s long-time duo with British vocalist Phil Minton, Desprez’s expansive collective Tournesol, and König’s experimental hip-hop solo endeavour Koenig – but they have found a deep rapport as Mopcut.

Mopcut on  YouTube

Kaos Puls (SWE / AUT)

Petter Eldh bass
Lukas König drums
Otis Sandsjö sax
 

Moskus Trio (NO) German premiere

Anja Lauvdal piano, synth
Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson double bass
Hans Hulbækmo drums
 

Mopcut (FR / AUT / USA) German premiere
Julien Desprez e-guitar
Lukas König drums
Audrey Chen vocals, electronics, cello