To say that Piano Music 3 continues where Alessandro Sgobbio left off on Piano Music 2 would be misleading, since this record feels less a step forward than a careful turning back toward the source, a reversal that reveals new truths by retracing old paths. The electronics remain, but rather than projecting momentum they seem to seep inward, extracting hidden ligaments from the piano’s body and letting them fall gently into the past. In “De Dei Dono,” barely discernible voices hover at the threshold of language, murmuring reminders that intention and consequence are often separated by a breath, that meaning arrives only after action has already passed. This dissolves seamlessly into the fragile radiance of “Red Gold,” an acoustic meditation whose quiet grandeur carries the weight of countless unnamed lives, each one lifted briefly from the archive of history and consigned to its fire, not to be erased but transmuted. “Echoes” reopens the digital aperture, arranging time with almost devotional care, as if memory itself were being sorted and polished in a dream. When the world outside feels uninhabitable, the music invites retreat into an interior sanctuary where despair still sings and hope persists despite knowing better, each phrase reaching upward while slowly collapsing. Within this tension, “Dogs On 5th Avenue” arrives with startling clarity, a cinematic reverie steeped in nostalgia that gestures toward a vanished geography preserved only on fragile film. Each return to it wears away more detail, faces softening into abstraction, footsteps advancing with quiet resolve while already suspecting the promise of arrival. As “Dawns (صور)” unfurls, beauty and grief become inseparable, and the act of listening feels perilously close to mourning, an unguarded response to the daily violence done to faith and empathy by a world addicted to fear. In such a climate, music offers not escape but a rare form of repair. “Veils” draws the self inward with measured grace, its flowing arpeggios and subtle electronic pulses converging into something revelatory, shedding concealment rather than enforcing it, blooming into nocturnal tenderness and the possibility of love. “Forte Rocca,” Sgobbio’s reimagining of Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” speaks with austere urgency, reframing the piano as a structure of shelter and resistance. At last, “Alang” advances carefully into first light, bearing the quiet residue of what has been lost so that something else may endure, leaving the listener suspended between fragility and resolve, uncertain yet unwilling to surrender the hope that survival itself can still be an act of grace.
After the intimate unveiling of Piano Music, Alessandro Sgobbio returns to place his instrument’s confessional power in a wider field of air and signal. This new work feels like a continuation of the same diary, only now the pages have been left open by a window. Live electronics enter not as ornament or distraction but as a means of listening more deeply. They clarify rather than obscure, giving the emotional truths at hand a longer reach, a resonance that lingers beyond the touch of the keys. What emerges is music that invites the listener to sit with it, inhabit its spaces, and recognize healing as slow, attentive, and unfinished.
From the outset, the album announces itself as a journey. “Keys And Returns” drifts with a sense of cautious freedom, as if learning to trust its own motion again. The surrounding sounds resemble nocturnal life, insects and birds rendered as soft static, not imitations of nature but its memory. These textures frame longer shadows, suggesting movement without urgency. It is the first step outside after a long confinement, when the world is still strange and full of promise.
That sense of tentative grace deepens in “Modular Circles,” where time itself seems to loosen its grip. Here, the added layers feel inseparable from the instrument’s inner life, as if dreaming aloud. Reflections wobble gently, disturbed just enough to remind us that memory is never still. Through subtle live manipulations, Sgobbio traces the outlines of absence and presence, ghosts that do not haunt so much as accompany. There is urgency, but it is the urgency of care, of knowing that attention itself is an ethical act.
Healing takes the form of water in “The River,” which salves a wound trembling in the night air. The music flows inward before opening outward, carrying introspection toward release, bearing the promise of another morning. It is not triumph that is offered here, but continuity. The simple assurance that movement, however gentle, is still movement.
Moments of restraint are equally vital. “Fondamenta De La Tana,” stripped of digital decoration, arrives like a hymn. Its solitude feels intentional, a reminder that healing also requires silence and unadorned speech. “Tula” follows with similar tenderness, notes hovering in reverie while distant traces flutter at the edges, as if the world were listening back. These pieces do not interrupt the album’s arc but ground it, reinforcing that the electronics are a choice among many ways of speaking.
The twin invocations of “Asker” feel like messages transmitted across thresholds. In “Asker (Light),” distant signals glow with the promise of peace earned through endurance. It acknowledges hardship without sanctification, offering instead a fragile hope that gives direction to wandering. Later, in “Asker (Trees),” that dialogue becomes almost conversational. Echoes are transformed into melodies, and melodies into the possibility of renewal.
“Îlot Chalon” briefly unsettles the calm, pairing pulsing undercurrents with a lyrical surface. Distortion presses upward, threatening to fracture the flow, yet beauty prevails, not by force but by persistence. It is a reminder that conflict is not foreign to healing, but part of its texture. The album closes with “Einhausung,” a fleeting moment of intimacy that feels like a hand resting on the shoulder. Nothing is resolved, yet everything is held.
Throughout, Sgobbio’s care is evident in every note and every silence. These are not performances designed to impress; they are reflections offered with humility. The electronics never cloud the piano’s voice but instead sharpen its emotional lucidity, extending feeling into space where it can be shared. By the end, the listener is handed something more generous than closure: time.
LP2 surfaces as memory: already in motion, already altered by time. It emerges from conditions set long before its contours became audible, shaped by residue and intention held in suspension. Vocalist Theo Bleckmann and electronic musician and producer Joseph Branciforte return to a shared language first articulated on 2019’s LP1, though “return” feels imprecise. What unfolds resembles a sustained act of listening.
The album opens in a state of half-awareness. Sound drifts forward without a fixed point of origin, part breath, part circuitry, voice and machine dissolving into one another before any roles can be assigned. Nothing announces itself. Instead, the ear is gently reoriented, adjusting to a space where boundaries have softened and distinctions lose urgency. Understanding gathers slowly, arriving through familiarity, through the sensation of being inside something that has been waiting.
This threshold was never intended. The opening fragment began as a technical aside, a moment caught incidentally and set aside. Heard on its own, it revealed an unexpected gravity. What might have been dismissed instead became a doorway that refused to close. Folding it back into earlier work no longer felt possible. From that insistence, LP2 quietly took form, bound to its predecessor through consequence.
Years removed from its initial capture, the album reads as an extended aftereffect. Its modest length disguises the precision of its attention. The exchange between Bleckmann’s mercurial voice and Branciforte’s powered architectures has grown increasingly permeable, unconcerned with hierarchy or authorship. Sound operates as shared terrain, a meeting place for intention, accident, and recollection.
Where LP1 favored immediacy, time is now allowed to fold inward. Improvisation remains central, guided by images, instructions, and gestures that never fully declare themselves. Layers are revisited and subtly reconfigured. At moments, structure briefly surfaces, a harmony aligning, a texture clarifying, before dissolving back into motion. What persists is the sensation of listening under pressure, of sound shaped by forces it cannot articulate.
Several longer works act as gravitational centers. In the opening piece, “1.13,” the voice strains toward release but remains suspended within a luminous enclosure. Light translates itself into sound, illuminating an abyss shaped by collective longing. Movement is tentative, nearly imperceptible, as if forward motion itself has grown uncertain. Falsetto phrases assert presence with quiet insistence, only to be repeatedly subsumed. The calm suggested on the surface carries an undercurrent of warning, a reminder that serenity and menace often coexist.
“11.15” unfolds as a contemplative space. Its pulse and interwoven voices, punctuated by gong-like resonances, suggest ritual, encouraging attention over destination. “7.21” permits deeper aporias. Here, Bleckmann elicits more palpable gestures, a vulnerability that feels unguarded and exposed. That tactility continues into “9.23,” where hymn-like passages orbit their own unraveling. The voice moves between grit and elevation, traversing emotional thresholds in compressed succession. Glockenspiel tones glimmer at the margins, offering fleeting points of orientation, reminders of impermanence.
Threaded throughout these pillars are shorter interludes that function as glitchy nervous tissue. They interrupt continuity, splintering the listening experience into moments of raw recall. These fragments feel unearthed, surfacing abruptly and vanishing just as quickly. Each prevents comfort from settling too fully. Among them, “10.17.13” leaves the most haunting imprint. Its click-driven pulse and premature dissipation suggest erosion in real time, the sound of something slipping beyond reach.
For all its beauty and atmosphere, LP2 carries a persistent shadow. It does not attempt to diagnose. Space is left open for reflection, trusting the listener to bring their own histories into the exchange. The album offers no tools, no instructions. It sings quietly toward the places where repair might begin, leaving discovery in our hands. What is reclaimed in this way carries a different weight. Recognition arrives slowly, shaped by attention, and whatever healing emerges feels earned, never bestowed.
Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, electronics Tomeka Reid violoncello Ches Smith drums, vibraphone, percussion, electronics Recorded January 2024 Firehouse 12, New Haven Engineer: Nick Lloyd Mixed by Craig Taborn, Manfred Eicher, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) Bavaria Musikstudios, München, July 2025 Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch Album produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: January 16, 2026
After beguiling audiences during their 2025 German tour in anticipation of the album at hand, pianist Craig Taborn, cellist Tomeka Reid, and percussionist Ches Smith align their trio for ECM’s first release of 2026. The title, Dream Archives, frames the music in the most charming of contradictions. Does it propose a vault where dreams can be stored, catalogued, and retrieved at will, filed away under emotional subject headings? Or does it imply that dreams themselves function as archives, containing versions of ourselves we would never dare to perform while awake? The answer seems to flicker between both states, never settling, always indexing something just out of reach.
The opening lines of “Coordinates For The Absent” lean toward the former interpretation through their careful laying down of intent. Subtle electronic signals hang in the air, suspended as if awaiting authorization, and the piece offers itself as a puzzle box of possibility, one that opens only when the correct sequence of ambient gestures is entered. Each removal reveals another chamber until a nexus of musicianship appears that feels parthenogenetic. What unfolds is a system waking up, blinking itself into awareness.
From this tender pile of ashes rises “Feeding Maps To The Fire,” a phoenix song rendered with turn-on-a-dime precision and lightning-fast cognition. Reid circles the square, squaring the circle even, granting Taborn and Smith a territory they can claim equally with hands and feet. Her transitions from declaration to sublimation arrive with uncanny grace, functioning as a single conductive wire of intention that transmits thought across the studio in real time. Direction is fed directly into combustion here, and nothing burns without learning something new about its own heat.
“Dream Archive” opens with Smith on vibraphone doubling Taborn while Reid recalibrates the internal circuitry with a quiet furiosity that hums beneath the surface. Some of the session’s most intimate connections are forged in this space. An intelligent system comes online, discovering its cellular reality one line of musical code at a time. Still, the music never forgets the hand that writes the algorithm. There is a constant searching for connections that only breath, skin, and intention can provide. Motifs bend themselves into a twisted ballad before being pushed off a cliff, tumbling across jagged terrain, landing improbably intact, scuffed but smiling.
“Enchant” turns the night sky inside out and offers it as a writable surface, a palimpsest of the heart rendered in constellation and groove. Reid’s ostinato summons further digital traces, as though the hairs of her bow were the threads to which these signals cling, pulled magnetically toward a pulse that knows how to moonwalk away from expectation.
Set within this sea of Taborn originals are pieces by two of his guiding lights. Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances” blossoms with the utmost delicacy, unfolding as a textile woven from shadow and intention. It searches for illumination in Taborn’s pianism and finds it as Reid and Smith combine their energies into ground, horizon, and sky. A stomping denouement introduces phenomenally geometric trio work, Reid on pizzicato assuming the role of bassist while Smith’s drumming speaks in joyful, articulated angles. The music smiles openly here, happiness not hinted at but announced, stamped, and joyfully notarized.
Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” continues that spirit of play, revealing a compositional singularity in which Taborn clearly recognizes a kindred mind. Its angular melody opens the door to some of the trio’s most delicately adventurous exchanges. The tune carries a faint echo of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” refracted through beat poetry, stripped of words, and filtered back into breath and wood and skin. Smith’s use of gong and timpani lends a ceremonial grandeur that never tips into pretension, offering Reid a tender surface upon which to draw her confident, decisive lines.
Ultimately, the dreamlike quality of Dream Archives does not arise from its unpredictability, nor from the way it renders the surreal inevitable. It emerges instead from the album’s theatrical intelligence. These performances understand that dreaming is an act, one that requires commitment, timing, and a willingness to forget oneself mid-gesture. The trio performs with the concentration of method actors who never break character because the character is the moment itself. In doing so, they blur the line between performer and listener, pulling us into their private syntax of meaning.
By the album’s close, the archive no longer feels like a place of storage but a living institution, one that rewrites itself each time it is entered. The dreams here are not preserved so much as rehearsed, practiced until they become fluent. When the final notes fade, it feels less as though the music has ended than as though we have woken up holding fragments we cannot fully explain. These are the kinds of dreams that follow you into daylight, that annotate your memory without permission, that insist on being remembered even as they refuse full recall. In that sense, we are reminded of how to keep dreaming with our eyes open, filing experience under wonder, and leaving the cabinet unlocked.
Piano Music does not announce itself; it waits patiently to be known. Alessandro Sgobbio comes back to the piano alone as one returns to a long-held silence, without urgency and without proof. These pieces are open letters, written and left unsealed. Some emerged in the fleeting intensity of live performance, others during the suspended hours of the pandemic, when time softened and listening became a discipline.
Recorded on a Fazioli F278 grand piano and shaped with restraint under the masterful ear of engineer Stefano Amerio at Artesuono Studios, the album unfolds patiently. Each dedication becomes a point of convergence between composer, listener, and the absent presence for whom the music was first shaped. With eyes closed and hands in motion, the instrument opens into an interior terrain where memory and invention share the same breath.
What follows is best approached as a fragrance that reveals itself gradually, in layers.
Top Notes
The opening carries a gentle luminosity, brief yet warming, like light passing through thin fabric. A floral softness appears first, pale and translucent, recalling the powdery hush of orris rising from the keys. In “Fireflies” (dedicated to Sgobbio’s parents), memory turns instinctively toward childhood. It recalls the earliest grammar of love, the quiet assurance of being held. Gratitude lingers in the air, unspoken yet unmistakable, giving the ordinary a sacred hue through attention alone.
From within this tenderness, darker tones begin to surface. “Zolla” introduces earth, black currant, soil, and the trace of wind crossing ground shaped by seasons. Time presses forward calmly, neither threat nor promise. Smoke gathers at the edges, yet a steady sweetness remains, offering reassurance without denial. A pulse forms beneath the surface, measured and human, suggesting that, even amid uncertainty, something continues to endure.
As the illumination shifts, green notes take hold. In “Atma Mater” (an ode to his mentor, pianist Misha Alperin), vetiver rises with clarity and motion. The colors begin to explore themselves, lyrical and curious, occasionally abstract, yet guided by intention. Surprise appears without rupture. Joy emerges through the satisfaction of movement that understands its own direction.
Heart Notes
As brightness settles, warmth comes forward. The center of the album glows with a softened oud, sandy, sunlit, and humane. In “Ghaza,” sound behaves like heat absorbed and slowly released, enveloping the listener with a calm shaped by time. Beneath this warmth lies a sober recognition. Peace, once forged through history, has thinned. What remains is the quieter labor of shaping it again, not collectively or symbolically, but one heart at a time. A requiem, perhaps, without end.
Incense follows, curling gently through imagined spaces of prayer. “Racemi” shelters like a room that remembers having been filled. The air carries traces of devotion, hands once folded, grief briefly set down. Beyond the threshold, chaos waits, but here a pause takes form, a fragile interval where the self steadies. The piano narrows to a fine thread, each note close to disappearance, yet it holds. Like a candle flame that refuses to leave its wick, its vibrations persist. As the harmony slowly widens, unexpected turns reveal depth upon depth.
Smoke returns, heavier now. In “Third Ward (Elegy),” written for George Floyd, it is not the fire itself but what remains after that fills the space. Loss hangs unresolved. A repeated insistence takes shape, low and unwavering, echoing the will to survive. It continues until it cannot. The music bears witness without ornament, allowing absence to speak louder than sound. What it offers is not rage alone, but the ache of interruption, of a life cut short, leaving resonance where continuity should have been.
Base Notes
The final descent turns cool and elemental. Marine air rises, salt and seaweed carried inland by memory. In “Acqua Granda,” the piano sharpens into clearer gestures, rhythm breaking and reassembling like waves meeting resistance. Energy tumbles forward, restless and alive, as if movement itself were being relearned after stillness.
Earth follows water. “Feuilles” settles with the quiet authority of oakmoss. From a distance, its form appears balanced, almost architectural. Closer in, it reveals wider variation, textured by decay. Longing enters gently, but for the way the sun once touched it. Enough of the dawn filters through to suggest what remains possible, even as it recedes.
At last, the fragrance thins to its final trace. In “Third Ward (Coda),” musk opens its embrace, intimate, warm, and human. A voice seeks continuation. The scent clings to the skin, marking the space where a life might have unfolded, had it been allowed to do so.
In the end, Piano Music binds itself to the body that carries it, altered by warmth and proximity. It mingles with memory, softens the boundary between presence and absence, and leaves behind not a melody to be recalled intact, but a sillage recognized later, unexpectedly, in the air. Some experiences ask only this, not to be remembered whole, but to return faintly, altered, and unmistakably human.
Hope drifts differently when it is set loose from the shore. Our Hope Is Lost At Sea arrives as a slow immersion rather than a statement, the eighth message in a bottle under Dann Michael Torres’ long-running Meanderings moniker and his first release for El Muelle Records. Across 11 pieces, it listens inwardly.
Torres works with sound the way a painter experiments with pigments. Guitars are multiplied, retuned, prepared, and worn thin by repetition, their voices folded into live electronics, tape fragments, and environmental residue. What emerges is not melody in the traditional sense, but colors shaped into mourning, solemn patterns and melancholic phrases, reverberations that feel less composed than uncovered.
“Empty Words” opens as a photograph undeveloping in real time. Your ears struggle to hold on to the image, but it fades of its own volition, seemingly caught in the net of amnesia in which all of us were ensnared when the album was recorded in 2020. It is a slow drift into places of the mind where you can experience good or evil. Here, you realize that the line between blissful dissociation and fearful isolation is too fine for the naked eye to register, yet unmistakable when felt. Its effects resemble a dying root system beneath an otherwise healthy-looking tree, remaining hidden until it is too late to save the specimen from certain death. The buzzing guitars and electronic washes recall Tim Hecker at his most subdued, as well as the early work of Jon DeRosa. In this case, however, the mind of genesis resides in the skull of an artist whose fires are lit only to watch them subside into embers. This is where grief begins.
What follows narrows the focus further, built from the fragment of a dying breath, left behind as a forensic trace and replicated until it yields a distinct emotional signature.
The cumulative effect of this restraint becomes apparent when an acoustic guitar finally enters the frame. Its appearance feels almost shocking, its clarity too real to accept, too contagious to approach, and too fragile to touch. Only as the piece unfolds do you realize you have been staring at your reflection the entire time. This makes the title of “Merely Shadows”feel less like poetic language and more like a diagnosis of the human condition. Even after the eclipse passes, fragments of that darkness cling to your skin, take shelter behind your eyelids, and graft themselves into your self-regard.
“Tethered Hand of a Savior” offers an all-too-brief gesture toward comfort amid quiet degeneration. Its rocking motion lulls you briefly into its embrace. Each chord reflects the last, drifting away as a plantlike photosynthesis bleeds into the foreground, leaving only a bass line behind as evidence that it was ever there. In its wake stands the title track, where shadows of heroes and heroines flit past with unrequited promises of healing.
Later passages introduce oceanic distortions and distant voices that brush the outer edges of the mind, summoning visions of a childhood that may or may not be your own. “Years Of Decline Yield No Wisdom” emerges as a mantra, repeated not in speech but through the laborious persistence of survival itself. Elsewhere, a tundra’s nightmare is turned inside out until it reveals a song. When the acoustic guitar reappears, its lucidity remains unsettling.
“You’ve Simply Had Enough of Drowning” closes with a thinning of presence. Thus, Our Hope Is Lost At Sea leaves you with the sense that something essential has been exposed and then gently withdrawn, as though the music has revealed a private interior space and asked you to sit alone with the knowledge of it. There is no catharsis here, no moment where grief lifts or resolves itself into sunlight.
In this way, Torres’ work feels less like a document of loss and more like an artifact shaped by endurance. The sounds linger because they refuse to be hurried past. Each piece carries the weight of its own patience. When the record finally releases you, it does so without reassurance. What you are left holding is not hope restored, but hope altered, stripped of illusion, reduced to something smaller and more durable. It is the kind of hope that no longer expects rescue, only the possibility of staying afloat. In that sense, Our Hope Is Lost At Sea does not mourn what has been lost so much as it honors what continues, fragile and uncelebrated, drifting onward in open water.
Our Hope Is Lost At Sea is available from Bandcamp here.
If you’ve been following my musical wanderings for some time, you may know that my all-time favorite band is Mediavolo from France. I recently had the honor of providing liner notes for their Blade Runner-inspired ode to 80s synthpop, Unvisible Science. Click the album cover to listen and read.
Some films document events, while others listen for what lingers after events have passed. Love Longing Loss: At Home with Charles Lloyd During a Year of the Plague belongs to the latter category. It is less a chronicle of pandemic isolation than a meditation on presence, memory, and the unseen currents that move through a life devoted to sound. Dorothy Darr’s portrait of her husband does not attempt to explain Charles Lloyd. Instead, it abides with him, attentive to breath, gesture, silence, and the slow unfolding of thought.
The film opens where many of Lloyd’s musical journeys have always begun: by the ocean. Waves rise and fall with a patient inevitability, an ancient pulse that predates and outlasts any human song. Over this elemental rhythm, the plaintive voice of the tarogato enters, its grainy timbre sounding both archaic and intimate. It feels less like an introduction than a return. The sea is not scenery here but a spiritual coordinate, a reminder that music, like water, moves in cycles of departure and homecoming.
From this threshold, Darr brings us inside. Lloyd sits at the piano, working through “Sky Valley Doll,” testing harmonies, letting phrases hover before committing them to air. The camera drifts across a wall of photographs populated by friends, collaborators, and fellow travelers, many now gone. When Lloyd lifts the melody to the saxophone, the tune exhales. Space becomes part of the composition. It is a moment that encapsulates his lifelong approach to music, one shaped by a metaphysical relationship to sound.
Lloyd speaks sparingly, and when he does, his words feel weighed against silence. “It’s been painful and a blessing,” he says of the time in isolation. The sentence arrives without punctuation, and none is needed. Pain and grace are not opposites here but concurrent states, held in the same body. The film understands this economy of language. It does not rush to interpret but allows feeling to surface on its own terms, trusting that music often articulates what speech cannot.
Throughout the film, Lloyd reflects on the blues of his Mississippi Delta upbringing, describing it as an infusion of ancestral lines rather than a style to be mastered. The blues, for him, is a transmission. It carries the weight of history, the residue of suffering, and the stubborn persistence of joy. His studies with Phineas Newborn, his immersion in Bartók, and his revelatory encounters with Bach are recalled as recognitions of continuity. These musics speak to one another across time because they emerge from similar urgencies. They are responses to being alive under pressure.
This sense of inherited gravity deepens when the film turns toward America’s racial history. Archival images of violence and resistance pass across the screen while Lloyd and his band perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The juxtaposition is stark yet restrained. The music does not comment on the images so much as lay them bare. Lloyd has long understood that every song carries encoded histories, that trauma is not only remembered but inherited. Laments are passed down genetically, he suggests, even when their origins are obscured or denied. To play music honestly is to acknowledge these shadows without surrendering to them.
In one of the film’s most affecting sequences, Lloyd performs “Nanapesa, Ishtahullo-chito,” chanting and shaking maracas before taking up the bass flute. Elsewhere, “Nacheka’s Lament” on tarogato closes a circle begun at the water’s edge. These performances serve as acts of witnessing from someone who has often described himself as both composer and reporter, someone compelled to offer what he sees and hears without embellishment. Reporting, in this sense, is not journalism but testimony.
Darr’s visual approach mirrors this ethos. Shot on modest equipment over several months, the film resists polish in favor of proximity. The domestic setting is never romanticized. It is simply where life happens now. Light shifts across rooms. Instruments wait patiently. Silence accumulates. There is a humility in this gaze that aligns with Lloyd’s own understanding of creative practice. To contribute to the world is not only to raise one’s voice but to know when to step aside, when to leave room for something else to speak.
Placed within the arc of a larger career, the film feels like a distillation. From the groundbreaking work in the 1960s through decades of restless collaboration, spiritual inquiry, and stylistic openness, Lloyd has consistently pursued music as a means of communion. He has never treated genre as a boundary or tradition as a museum. Instead, he has approached sound as a living archive, one in which no music is ever truly lost once it has been made.
Love Longing Loss does not conclude with resolution. It offers no summation of a life, no closing statement on art in a time of crisis. What it leaves us with instead is a question that feels both ancient and urgent. If music is indeed the biographical record of all who came before, what responsibility do we bear as listeners and makers within that record? Lloyd speaks of swimming away with his stories and his ancestors, an image that suggests movement without escape, continuity without stasis. The film ends in that current, inviting us to consider how we, too, might learn to listen for what persists beneath the noise, and how we might honor the voices that sound through us even when we believe we are alone.
Artists often draw their deepest language from the places that first shaped their ears. For Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, and John Surman, those places lie far apart geographically, culturally, and temperamentally. Yet, they converge in a shared devotion to improvisation and to the long memory carried by folk and classical traditions. Each musician arrives bearing an inheritance that feels less chosen than received. Ban carries the resonance of Transylvanian soil and song, absorbed long before jazz became his working language. Maneri brings an intuitive fluency, shaped by lineage and lived immersion rather than mere instruction. Surman arrives from open landscapes and weathered distances, his voice shaped by wind and horizon, ancient in contour and unsettled in spirit. Together they move as messengers through a forest of inherited material, carrying signals rather than declarations.
That shared path leads to Béla Bartók, whose early 20th-century field recordings in Transylvania revealed a music at once elemental and inexhaustible. Bartók sought preservation through rescue and documentation, gathering what might otherwise vanish. Ban, Maneri, and Surman approach these songs differently. For them, the material functions as a living threshold rather than a dying art, per se. Carols, laments, love songs, and dances do not arrive as artifacts to be handled, but as presences to be encountered, forms capable of friction and renewal.
Rather than fixing these melodies in place, the trio leaves them deliberately open-ended. Transcriptions act as waymarkers rather than maps. Fragments stretch and breathe until new centers of gravity appear. Silences are openings. Roles circulate, dissolve, re-form. What emerges absorbs history without sealing it off, allowing the past to remain porous to the present. Beneath everything runs a current older than borders or schools, a knowledge carried in breath and gesture. Thus, these tunes shelter a human grain, worn smooth by use, whether shaped by peasant hands or bent through jazz.
On Cantica Profana, recorded across three European concerts between November 2022 and November 2023, that grain is fully awakened. The album unfolds like a passage through shadowed terrain, where individual pieces as clearings briefly illuminated. The appearances of “Violin Song I” and “Violin Song II” establish a language of restless intimacy. Their skittering surfaces mask a deep inward focus, as muted piano strings and fragmentary viola lines open space for Surman’s soprano saxophone to move with playful acuity. His voice does not lead so much as observe, circling the material with curiosity. Novelty carries little weight here. These playgrounds are built from old principles and long-held feelings, animated by the freedom with which they are entered.
As the forest deepens, the melodies turn toward absence. “First Return” introduces a somber presence, Surman’s keening soprano a solitary call carried through the night air. That impulse surfaces again in “Last Return,” where wandering itself becomes a form of knowledge. Everything moves in widening circles around silence, the stillness that precedes life and waits beyond it, following not paths marked on maps but traces left by lived experience.
“Dowry Song I,” the first of two such communal clearings along the way, introduces the bass clarinet, its rough fibers weaving textures of interlaced light. Beneath it, Ban’s piano establishes a gentle cadence, enlivening Maneri’s viola until it takes on a copper patina. The trio finds a rocking motion that feels ritualistic, generous, drawing out the melody’s embedded joy before releasing it toward a distant horizon. “Dowry Song II” returns to this space with greater density and color, the voices braided into a resilient weave where each strand strengthens the others.
Other pieces arrive as messages carried from deeper within the trees. “Up There” repeatedly opens with extended bass clarinet meditations, Surman circling the melody until it settles into focus. Around this, Ban and Maneri widen the terrain, giving the line ground and horizon. What follows is often a dance of striking acuity, allowing Maneri room to roam while preserving collective balance. “A Messenger Was Born” distills this sensibility into a quiet prayer and inward dirge for those yet to be lost, for figures glimpsed briefly and never fully named.
“Dark Forest” stands as both setting and invocation. It unfolds as a lush, dreamlike traversal of nocturnal paths, where beauty emerges slowly. Improvisatory spirals coexist with melodic clarity in this, the trio’s deepest attunement. Meanwhile, the title track begins with struck resonance, muted piano notes falling like measured footsteps, before yielding to Maneri’s fluid inflections.
“Evening in the Village” captures darkness as a settling rather than a conclusion. Starlight defines the space as much as shadow. Thoughts, anxieties, romances, and plans continue their quiet circulation. By the time of “Transylvanian Dance,” the accumulated energy breaks open. An anticipatory rhythm gives way to exuberant confluence, Surman’s soprano emerging as a vividly human presence.
The standalone vinyl The Athenaeum Concert, recorded in June 2024 at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, extends this language with an even deeper patience. Where Cantica Profana often reads like a gathering of poems or stories, this companion album unfolds more like a life remembered in long form. “Evening in the Village (Bitter Love)” opens with a mournful viola that sounds like an extinct instrument briefly summoned back into breath. Wrinkled yet supple, it enters bearing generational weight. As dampened piano footsteps join and the bass clarinet emerges, the music takes on the temperament of weather itself, fog and time moving across the land, before slowly turning toward dance.
The present version of “Dowry Song” leaps immediately into motion, raining promises with the force of embodied love. The bass clarinet grounds itself, inviting participation, while the viola lifts free, buoyed by Ban’s steady, turning pianism. “Up There” again traces a river’s course, winding through brush under historical pressure, moving from insistence to reverie across its span. “Violin Song” builds gradually from quiet stirrings until Surman’s soprano takes flight, migrating toward warmth. Joy radiates through the exchange, though darkness lingers beneath, a reminder that wonder and struggle remain entwined.
Taken together, the two albums read as studies in ethical listening, in how sound is allowed to appear rather than be summoned by force. Their connection lies partly in shared source material, but more decisively in the trio’s instinct to remain inside unfolding time. Duration becomes a form of care. Attention turns toward relationship, toward the ways voices breathe around one another, and toward the responsibility carried by each choice. Folk material is treated as lived terrain, entered with awareness of what has already passed through it and what may yet arrive. From this stance emerges a vision of tradition shaped by patience and watchfulness, where meaning rises slowly from sustained uncertainty.
Maneri is often described as a microtonal improviser, yet the music pursued here feels macrotonal in spirit, resisting borders and divisions in favor of a broader resonance. Ban serves as both anchor and instigator, shaping time without enclosing it, anchoring the ensemble while inviting risk. Surman contributes a voice that feels elemental rather than ornamental, his reeds acting as carriers of weather and message, passing freely through the ensemble like breath through leaves. And so, the distance between Bartók’s Edison phonograph and now collapses into a single resonant gesture, fulfilling his quiet prophecy from 1921, that future musicians might uncover truths the original collectors could not yet hear.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 