ECM Special I

| Tyran Grillo

Among the many rarities I’ve come across in this journey to review all things ECM, few are as intriguing as the 10-part “ECM Special” series released in Japan on Trio Records throughout the 1970s. The tracks on this inaugural album, all recorded in the earliest part of that decade, exude the energy of an unlocked room. The compilation gathers music from a formative stretch in ECM’s history, but its deeper fascination lies in the way it catches artists at the edges of statements they were still learning how to make. These are not simply leftovers, alternates, or marginalia, but apertures into manners of completion. Thus, the album offers a small constellation of provisional illuminations, each track carrying the charge of musicians moving through the half-lit corridor between impulse and form.

The Japanese liner notes deepen the sense of this release as both a historical document and a carefully considered act of transmission. Manfred Eicher contributes a brief but telling note of thanks to Trio, giving the label his blessing not only for preserving ECM’s commitment to sound quality but also for helping introduce its artists to Japanese listeners with the seriousness and care their music deserved. Hisamatsu Noguchi’s accompanying history of the label situates the compilation at an especially early stage in ECM’s development: his note that ECM had released only about 20 LPs by that point reminds us how close this music still was to the label’s origins. “Over the last three years or so,” he writes, “the musically rich jazz records released by ECM have, in no small measure, also served as a warning to existing jazz records that have become bogged down in commercialism.” In that formulation, ECM emerges not simply as a new label with a distinctive aesthetic but as a corrective pressure within the broader jazz marketplace, insisting on space, intention, and fidelity at a time when such values could feel imperiled. Noguchi extends that idea in his praise of Eicher for providing his musicians with “a concert-like setting […] in which to realize their pure intentions and musical plans.” 

And yet, the first track on the album is not an “ECM” track at all, though it comes with a relevant provenance in tow. In February 1972, Chick Corea formed the first iteration of Return to Forever with Stanley Clarke, Joe Farrell, Airto Moreira, and Flora Purim, recording the band’s eponymous ECM debut under the production of Manfred Eicher. During this same period, Corea and Clarke were also working with Stan Getz in a group that included Tony Williams, and on March 3, 1972, that ensemble recorded Captain Marvel for Columbia. The album included several Corea compositions, among them “Captain Marvel” and “500 Miles High.” Because of label entanglements, with Return to Forever associated with ECM in Europe and the Getz/Corea project issued by Columbia in the United States, later reissues and compilations sometimes drew these worlds into partial alignment. On ECM Special I, this music carries the feeling of a border crossing, jazz history folding its passport into a paper crane and sending it over several oceans at once.

Featuring Corea on electric piano, Farrell on flute, Clarke on electric bass, and Moreira on percussion, “Captain Marvel” bursts forward with radiant, forthright energy. The Return to Forever identity is unmistakable. Clarke’s bass does not merely propel the tune. It persuades it, shoulders it, gives it a muscular itinerary and a gleaming set of wheels. Everything interlocks with rare confidence, the groove sustained by an internal combustion that never clots or dims. Farrell’s flute surveys the whole journey from a height of untroubled clarity, while Corea’s solo reaches outward with quicksilver assurance, threading brightness through the piece’s open frame. The result is evangelically kinetic, a song with its windows flung open to the luxurious irresponsibility of motion.

In light of all this extroverted velocity, “Seven II,” an unreleased take from Paul Bley’s Open, To Love. This version offers a more compact reading of the Carla Bley tune, turning toward realms of infolding affection. Bley’s touch seems to ask questions that the piano answers only in fragments, with the gravity of a mind reluctant to flatten feeling into explanation. Dissonant turns open small fissures in the lyric surface. Improvisational asides appear and disappear with the delicacy of thoughts glimpsed in profile. Moments of friction and concentrated resistance somehow grant the music its most lucid affirmations. By the final bluesy flourish, the piece has bowed to its own interior turbulence.

“Georgian Bay,” from Conception Vessel, features bandleader Paul Motian on drums, Charlie Haden on bass, and Sam Brown on guitar. It is a richly flowing track that surrenders itself to fluctuations of astonishing clarity. The music feels hyper-real in its depiction of time and place, yet the longer one listens, the more unreachable its world becomes. Brown’s arpeggios ripple with patient luminosity, Motian’s cymbals and percussion scatter points of mineral brightness, and Haden’s bass moves through the piece with lyrical sinew and grave freedom. The track evokes a landscape without illustrating it, which is always the harder and more mysterious achievement. Its minimal means generate an immense field of suggestion. Nothing is overdrawn, yet everything seems haunted by a fullness just outside the frame.

“Strings” is an unusual track, with Chick Corea improvising on the internal strings of the piano. Brief, kinetic, molecular, and intricate, it feels torn from the instrument’s hidden nervous system. The piano becomes a cabinet of bones and metallic dreams from which Corea coaxes a dense concentration of gesture and possibility. Drawn from the archives of the Piano Improvisations duology, the piece has the quality of a private experiment that accidentally opens onto metaphysics. In less than a handful of minutes, it suggests that an instrument is never singular. It is a society of concealed mechanisms waiting for a sufficiently curious intelligence to disturb its sleep.

“Brujo II,” from the vicinity of Trios/Solos, brings together Ralph Towner on 12-string guitar, Glen Moore on bass, and Colin Walcott on tabla. The track begins with sparkling guitar, then Walcott’s tabla gives the music traction while Moore’s arco bass draws its shapes into audible being. The chemistry is sometimes looser than what ultimately made it onto the album, yet that looseness has its own revealing quality, a sense of musicians finding the floor as they walk across it. Towner’s guitar glints with prismatic discipline, Walcott supplies an earthy centrifugal pull, and Moore’s lines turn the surrounding space into a darkened planetarium. The piece feels exploratory in the truest sense, testing how much unknown territory an ensemble’s shared breath can hold.

“Counterphonymic,” a track that fell by the wayside of Facing You, is a brief improvised piece with a twisted, jazzy flavor that refuses to stand still. Its rhythms falter yet lurch onward with a strange uprightness, producing an anxious but satisfying momentum. One might call it drunken, were it not for the crystal-clear intentionality beneath the surface. Keith Jarrett’s phrasing keeps slipping through trapdoors of its own devising, yet every stumble becomes a decision retroactively revealed as necessary. The piece is full of crooked intelligence, a miniature theater of imbalance in which poise is achieved by declining all conventional forms of poise.

“Bruremarsj,” with Jan Garbarek on tenor saxophone, Arild Andersen on bass, and Edward Vesala on drums, comes from Triptykon. A traditional tune, it works beautifully through proudly air-filled lungs, carrying a heartfelt and playful quality. Garbarek’s tone has a rural austerity that does not exclude tenderness. Andersen’s bass grounds the piece with quiet conviction, while Vesala’s drums complicate the path without disturbing its communal spirit. The track feels unified in a way that does not require polish. Its open grain is the point.

“Noon Song II,” an outtake from Piano Improvisations Vol. 1, shifts between lyrical reverie and upbeat dance with an almost mercurial sense of character. Corea moves between inwardness and buoyancy without making either feel stable for long. The piece keeps discovering new rooms inside itself, some intimate, some vividly animated, each entered with the fluency of an artist for whom improvisation is not wandering but instantaneous architecture. Its beauty lies in the way tenderness can suddenly acquire a pulse and motion can suddenly turn reflective. Corea lets moods infiltrate one another until the distinction between them begins to blur.

Taken as a whole, ECM Special I offers a timely glimpse into the recorded and performing process during a foundational period in ECM’s history. Yet its value extends beyond historical curiosity. The album reveals that the periphery of a catalog can contain some of its most charged material, precisely because these performances have not been embalmed by canonical expectation. They show musicians shaping sound at the edge of decision, making art before art has fully recognized itself in the mirror.

The deepest pleasure of this collection is that it refuses the museum logic of secondary material. Rather than asking us to treat these pieces as supplements to more authoritative albums, it invites us to imagine creation itself as an incomplete archive, a series of rooms opening behind the rooms we thought were barred from entry. In that sense, ECM Special I teaches that music’s most profound revelations may not arrive as monuments. Sometimes they appear as side doors, pencil marks, fragments saved by accident, faint signals from the workshop of becoming. And perhaps the life we call finished is also only another take, preserved on some impossible label, waiting for an unknown listener to lower the needle and hear, beneath all our official versions, the trembling master we never knew we had recorded.

Wolfgang Muthspiel Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for All About Jazz documents my thoughts on this phenomenal new album by Wolfgang Muthspiel’s “Chamber Trio,” featuring trumpeter Mario Rom and pianist Colin Vallon alongside the guitarist. Drummerless jazz of the highest order that fans of Muthspiel’s work on ECM won’t want to miss. Click the cover below to read more.

Valeria Luiselli/Ricardo Giraldo/Leo Heiblum: Echoes from the Borderlands

| Tyran Grillo

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.
–Gloria Anzaldúa

Echoes from the Borderlands is a collective comprised of Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. It also names the 24-hour sound piece that explores and gives voice to areas of interstate violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. At the core of this sonic experience is a living canvas of sorts, a vibrational palimpsest built from binaural and quadraphonic recordings. Into this are woven archival recordings and other voices, authored by Luiselli, which move through the piece as necessary witness and disturbance. The result is a constellation of counternarratives to the official stories that pervade our newscycle, allowing Indigenous, brown, and black perspectives to keep pace with the conventional histories that ignore or kill them. The land itself serves neither as an abstraction nor as a mere foil for sociopolitical musings. It is a witness whose testimony has been buried under weary curricula and the administrative trance of empire. In this way, the project upsets the schema that dominates our lives in standard parochial models, not by refuting them point by point, but by placing beside them a deeper grammar of residue and return.

The present chapbook is the first study in this hallway, a narrow, illuminated passage that provides insight into the project’s core values and perspectives. Subtitled “Call You When I Get Home,” it exceeds the categories of reading and auditory experience, even as readers can scan a QR code to access its accompanying audio file. It is interactive in the most imperative sense. The pages are divided into three columns of text: the left representing the voices of imagined personas, which the reader is encouraged to read aloud during the allotted timestamps; the right containing interviews and archival materials; the middle holding field recordings taken during the authors’ travels across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Over the course of 71 minutes, the reader becomes an implicative subject who must regard their own life experiences and histories as braided into those of maiming and erasure. To listen is to enter a chamber in which history does not sit behind glass but presses its mouth to the present tense.

The sounds open with a clear recording of humpback whales off the Pacific Coast, bringing us into dialogue with nature, a realm in which the cares of human self-interest have no throne. Yet this solace is short-lived because the first voice we hear questions why, in creation myths, the earth and sky are always “cloven asunder.” Must everything be broken to be told? Then again, such is the nature of trauma: we must be fragmented before we can be made whole. And our tormenters know and exploit this intimately. Stories get stolen, butchered, and consumed until they turn into the feces of time, buried along with the rest of our detritus in the middens of the forgotten. In this opening movement, the piece establishes one of its fiercest claims: that creation and destruction have too often been forced into the same orality, and that origin stories carry their own hidden instruments of cutting. Every atom is narrated by those who learn to split it.

The border, then, is the “margin of a page,” a place where the real commentary begins and where the thoughts we hold dear can manifest beyond what is published, printed, and codified. One voice, for example, tells us about the many iterations of the border wall since President Truman erected the first in 1945, just after World War II. Not coincidentally, those initial chain-link fences were dug from the very desert where Japanese Americans were interned before being trucked to the border. “Each president,” we are reminded, “has since potlucked his bit of iron, steel, cement, mesh, and wire.” Despite what legacy media would have us believe, no one in recent history is guiltless of this charge. Everyone has that dust and ballast on their hands. In light of this, the border does not emerge here as a fixed line but as an accumulating technology of dread, a ceremonial scar renewed by the ritual polishing of fear on a national level. Its materials migrate across history with obscene efficiency. What once enclosed the demonized now repels the displaced. The same metal keeps changing uniforms.

Many of the archival voices concern how true love gets trampled by systemic pressures of citizenship, feeling lost and found by the enemy. We hear the sounds of people crossing the border, their bodies reduced to mechanical baggage that reflects time in constant reversal. Desire itself is subject to inspection, while kinship must answer to paperwork. The body, in transit, is converted into a problem of storage, the metaphysical insult of being processed by a system that cannot recognize the sacred velocity of arrival.

An unheard story then emerges: voices of detention center inhabitants whose lives have been confined to shells of their former selves. Children are taken from their parents and kept “in their place.” Woven into their testimony are histories of early-20th-century racial eugenics in the U.S., which, let it not be forgotten, would become the model for Nazi Germany. The haunting audio of a promo film about the lushness of revitalized land, using water to bring newness to the desert, arrives at the expense of forced sterilization. Both involve the severing of channels. The parallel is vastly intentional, the female reproductive cycle and anatomy mapped not over but under the land, out of sight and out of mind, so that the infrastructural powers that be need not acknowledge the effects of their own actions. The fantasy of improvement conceals a theater of extraction. The project asks us to hear irrigation as incision, settlement as anesthesia, and fertility as a field administered by those who confuse conquest with care. But the land cannot be settled, for it is constantly in motion. Those who kill try to force the illusion of its stillness, yet entropy always wins. The only certainty is possibility.

“And which story do you believe in?” we are asked. Only then do we realize the luxury of not answering, of turning both the physical and metaphorical page, tuning the radar dishes of our ears to off-planet signals while terrestrial cries go unheard. Speech acts are life acts, birthing newness and assertion that someone was here. They are the vibrational footprints most easily ignored. Yet they can also be recovered and repurposed. What is the point of fear when it is manufactured as a drug to be taken by mouth? The question hangs in the auditory field with almost pharmacological force. Fear circulates through public life as the prescription of a patriotic supplement, whereupon it is metabolized and mistaken for instinct. Against this, Echoes from the Borderlands offers listening as detoxification, not in the shallow language of purity, but as an intellectual and bodily refusal to let terror do all the thinking.

Still, all of this casts doubt on our ability to know what has been shielded from us, for how can we begin to document what is no longer there? And yet, perhaps there is no need to document in the ordinary sense but rather to make space for the old and forgotten paths. Just because one gentrifies the land does not mean the veins running beneath it are bloodless. The heart of the earth is still beating. Knowledge does not exist to be extracted but to be lived and passed on to those with private power, those who inherit not domination but obligation. Therefore, the proverbial question is not whether a tree that falls alone in a forest makes a sound, but whether the death cry of the one falling at the hands of its destroyer is ever acknowledged. We are returned to this ethical threshold time and again, reminded that sound is never merely sound. It is a demand placed upon the living by that which has been made absent, if only by being declared administratively unreal.

And the more we learn of the history of pleasure, and how women’s access to it continues to be medically inhibited, the less room remains for any excuse. The ores of the world are the building blocks of their oppression; that is what we so often forget. Without the materiality of that harm, there might not be so much destruction. From the copper mines that find their way into IUDs to the sand and rock that hide the bodies of victims, they are the disease and the artificial cure, the problem, reaction, and solution, all rolled into one. Because the more you dig into the earth, the more of an excuse you have to kill for what you find. Extraction becomes a philosophy before it becomes an industry. It trains the eye to regard depth as inventory. In the chapbook’s most unsettling passages, body and sediment are coextensive archives of intrusion. What is done to one is rehearsed upon the other, and the wound learns to speak in minerality.

By the time we encounter the long, wordless passage of a Union Pacific train at the 49’40” mark, we must face our own complicities in the contents of its cargo. Where are all of those materials going? Whose financial and political interests will they serve? By the time we wonder, it is already too late, for the objects of our scrutiny are already on their way to destinations we can only imagine. Not the trainyards and depots written on delivery logs, but the bodies in which they will eventually find a host to parasitically take over slowly, year after year, until their role in the deaths of the Other is obscured beyond recognition. The sound of a military plane flying overhead, too, reminds us that the long arm of surveillance reaches into homes and orifices while we sleep. Because no one can hear you from that high up. Aerial power converts people into smudges of movement beneath an indifferent machine sky. It is the same script of altitude as moral evasion.

One might feel inclined to pore through these recollections in search of secrets that may enlighten us about their hidden meanings, but such an approach amounts to an uncut key at best. In this case, we do better to see the act of recording as a living practice, a ritual of attendance in which capture does not mean possession. And while it is tempting to read Echoes from the Borderlands as an index of disorientation or a manual for wandering through the ruins of state-sponsored sense, we must see in its rhythms and framings an affirmative orientation, not so much an act of alienation as an alienation of action. The project estranges the habits that render violence ordinary. It asks the listener to inhabit the interval before conclusion, the charged hollow between hearing and response, where responsibility first begins to condense.

“The ear,” wrote Pauline Oliveros, “is a faithful collector of all sounds that can be gathered within its limits of frequency and amplitude. Sounds beyond the limits of the ear may be gathered by other sensory systems of the body.” Might we, then, read the microphone as an ear of expanded intimacy or even radical hospitality that gathers what the sanctioned ear has been trained to discard in anticipation of the real? Then again, the English word anticipate has its roots in the Latin ante and capere, giving us a portmanteau that means “before taking.” A painful reminder that we arrive after the seizure and before the reckoning, in that spectral jurisdiction where every footstep is both evidence and plea.

The timely charge of Echoes from the Borderlands lies in its refusal to convert suffering into a discernible shape. It does not “cleanse” the archive or turn the border into a metaphor tidy enough to be carried away unharmed. Instead, it leaves us with the difficult splendor of relation: the knowledge that every silence contains a confiscated name. To listen here is to accept that the connection from soul to soul is not waiting somewhere ahead, already engineered by grace, but must be made through the unbearable patience of continuing.

Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.

Jason Moran/BlankFor.ms/Marcus Gilmore: Shards

| Tyran Grillo

Shards continues the sonic excavation the trio of Jason Moran, BlankFor.ms, and Marcus Gilmore began with Refract, though excavation may be too archaeological a word for music so hip to its own aliveness. Everything arrives mid-combustion, pieces of a shattered mirror refusing ordinary alignment. These performances fold time against its own grain until memory and anticipation become indistinguishable textures rubbing against the skin of the present. The band approaches improvisation as the construction of an unstable infrastructure erected from interference. One senses throughout the record an in-the-moment commitment to permeability, every sound allowing another to pass through it without surrendering its own integrity.

“Shard I” emerges from a piano that appears electronically bruised, its fractured utterances surrounded by Gilmore’s rolling cymbals and drums, which seem to illuminate the negative space around it. Moran approaches the keyboard with extraordinary restraint, to the point where resolution becomes irrelevant. The music adopts a state of ongoing arrival, inhaling its own vapor. When a trip-hop undercurrent finally surfaces, it does so with the uncanny sensation of stumbling upon a geographic anomaly. As BlankFor.ms exposes hidden nerves beneath the music’s flesh, echoes gather around Moran’s lyrical improvisations with a cinematic charge, though never one interested in spectacle. Their beauty self-governs cautiously, carrying tenderness through hostile terrain without ever announcing vulnerability outright.

“Tape Loop A Echo” feels generated from the molecular aftermath of this slow-motion explosion. Tiny droplets gather patiently before expanding into something oceanic. Texture becomes the governing principle here, as rhythms thicken into edible densities and harmonies dissolve against synthetic residue. Gilmore’s drumming possesses astonishing elasticity, simultaneously grounding and destabilizing the ensemble, granting Moran enough gravitational footing to plunge deeper into abstraction without succumbing to it entirely.

The emotional center of the album resides within “Shard II,” where malleted percussion and drifting cymbals create the sensation of standing at the threshold of some unnamed psychic aperture. Moran’s piano circles with mournful patience, peering beyond ordinary cognition toward regions where identity loses its edges. The piece carries genuine existential terror, purified into surrender. Its descent recalls the metaphysical fatalism at the heart of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, particularly Jen Yu’s impossible leap into emptiness, transformed into an act of lucid acceptance. The mood reaches a strange reconciliation with annihilation, not dramatizing death but absorbing it into the bloodstream of the composition itself.

“Shard III” follows with devastating gentility. Moran’s pianism here feels almost aqueous, every phrase dissolving as it forms, yet never losing emotional precision. The piece carries the intimacy of private mourning transformed into communal ritual, offering solace without sentimentality. “Barbershop” abruptly ruptures this meditative atmosphere, diving headlong into groove-driven delirium. Dissonant harmonies collide against frenetic percussion and electronic manipulation in an ode to overstimulation. Its true brilliance lies in the way it converts velocity into psychological compression. One feels hunted by the unbearable acceleration of perception in an age where every signal arrives multiply split.

“And The Pieces Are Falling” moves through ambient terrain haunted by synthetic fauna and distant tonal apparitions, creating the impression of wandering through a digital ecosystem abandoned by its creators yet still self-sustaining. Then comes “Shard IV,” whose luminosity mutates into something volcanic. “Shard V” closes the cycle with blues inflections. Moran allows slight asymmetries to remain exposed on the surface of things, through which human fragility breathes.

The watchword for Shards is tactility. This album does not simply present sound as touchable. It treats touch as a philosophical condition, every vibration carrying evidence of contact between bodies, machines, histories, and griefs. Moran, BlankFor.ms, and Gilmore present this evidence in a language capable of articulating what ordinary coherence cannot contain.

Maria Lassnig: Film Works (INDEX 051)

| Tyran Grillo

The films of Maria Lassnig are worth their weight in the sediment of their unearthing. Even in moments of deliberate construction, they carry the scars of something recovered beyond psychic awareness, arising from the muscular ache preceding perception. Throughout this timely volume, one senses an artist trying to place consciousness under physical pressure until it reveals its own anatomy. The result is not simply a supplementary chapter to her endeavors as a painter but an adjacent nervous system running alongside it, flickering with all the involuntary impulses that painting alone could not contain—or, more accurately, contained all along.

Lassnig (1919–2014) is now firmly established among the essential painters of the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly through her concept of Körpergefühl, or “body-awareness,” whereby sensation itself becomes the origin of image-making. Yet a good portion of the animate pieces she produced during her years in New York throughout the late 1960s and 1970s were half-finished gestures that seemed destined to remain suspended in private time. Even as some titles, including Selfportrait, Iris, and Couples, slowly entered the institutional bloodstream of museums and repertory programs, much of the work stayed dormant until Mara Mattuschka and Hans Werner Poschauko restored and completed the unfinished pieces in 2018, meticulously following Lassnig’s notes and instructions. The achievement documented in this remarkable release from INDEX lies not merely in preservation but in resurrection. One feels the incomparable intimacy of standing beside an artist who departed the world while leaving certain doors ajar.

The publication itself resembles an anatomical atlas. Essays, reflections, and conversations by James Boaden, Beatrice von Bormann, Jocelyn Miller, Stefanie Proksch-Weilguni, and Isabella Reicher intermingle with notebooks, sketches, diagrams, annotations, and unfinished ideas that expose the texture of Lassnig’s thinking with startling immediacy. The accompanying DVD containing selections from her “film in progress” extends this sensation further, allowing the reader to encounter new states of becoming through weathered lenses. Lassnig’s unfinishedness possesses a density uniquely her own. Her practice continues to move with the conviction that uncertainty is not without form.

What emerges most forcefully is Lassnig’s refusal to conceal the mechanisms of a multifaceted inquiry. Her metaphors announce themselves without embarrassment. Her allegories remain jagged and naked. Emotional states are never dissolved into palatable ambiguity. Yet beneath the bluntness of her symbols, there persists an immense stillness, a meditative calm that transforms exposure into something almost devotional. Trauma becomes a cloud’s shadow moving across meadows of consciousness, visible in every frame yet never granted total dominion.

This quality appears immediately in Seasons (1970), her first cinematic foray, in which cutout animation tracks cyclical transformations through ecstatic bursts of movement accompanied by Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Jazzmen. Here, the body already exists as mutation and instability. Her recurring spinal bird figure jerks across the frame with the vulnerability of a creature halfway between instruction and hallucination. The handmade tactility of the animation is crucial. Lassnig never treats movement as a seamless illusion. Motion arrives in increments, each shift retaining the memory of the hand that repositioned it. One feels the dexterity of fingers behind the image.

Tactile thinking deepens in Encounter (1970), her first traditional hand-drawn animation. Two abstract forms drift toward one another through a field of trembling pinks, one curious, the other defensive, their interaction oscillating between seduction and annihilation. Set to Morton Subotnick’s Touch (1969), the piece unfolds as an anatomy of intimacy stripped of social performance. Desire becomes texture rather than narrative. Affection emerges through abrasion. The figures merge and recoil with an almost cellular uncertainty, suggesting organisms learning the terror of coexistence in real time. Lassnig renders emotional encounter as a process of bodily negotiation in which tenderness and violence intertwine.

New York itself enters the proverbial frame as interference incarnate. In Moonlanding/Janus Head (1970), the city appears through fractured overlays of moon-landing footage, skaters, skyscrapers, film clips from Gone With the Wind(1939) and Spartacus (1960), and Janus-faced superimpositions that evoke thresholds of transition. Lassnig once described emigrating to New York in 1968 as feeling akin to landing on the moon, and the piece captures precisely that sensation of estrangement. The city becomes an extraterrestrial theater of surfaces. Familiar cultural symbols flicker with increasing unreality until the moving image itself appears as a species of collective hallucination.

That sense of urban dislocation reaches another form in Broadway I (1970), where drag performers and street theater troupes inhabit a Manhattan overflowing with improvisatory self-invention. Lassnig’s camera never settles into anthropological distance. Sunlight through trees interrupts the parade. Bodies drift in and out of double exposure. Public spectacle melts into private reverie. One senses an artist discovering that identity in New York is permanently provisional, assembled from fragments of costume, posture, and exhaustion.

Her extraordinary Stone Lifting. A Self Portrait in Progress (1971–74) extends this inquiry inward with almost frightening candor. Paintings appear in various states of completion, bodies distort against glass and canvas, and gallery visitors circulate among images whose origins they cannot possibly perceive. Meanwhile, back in the studio, Lassnig drops a stone onto parts of her own body. However, the impact itself remains partially withheld from the viewer, creating an unbearable tension between anticipated pain and cinematic restraint. The self here exists as a site of perpetual excavation. Every image carries traces of prior selves buried beneath it.

The attention devoted to friends and collaborators reveals another dimension of Lassnig’s gaze. In Soul Sisters Hilde (1972), the eponymous subject moves between weaving, sculpture, forests, and domestic quiet while Webern’s string quartet music hovers with spectral delicacy. Creativity here appears inseparable from solitude. Hilde’s loom becomes an extension of consciousness itself, a structure through which memory can be threaded into visible form. Meanwhile, Soul Sisters Alice (1974) transforms friendship into ritual theater. Blindfolded recollections of former lovers, wine sprayed onto flesh, Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, and arcs of electricity crossing naked skin: such are the artifacts of its ceremonial intensity. “An absurd game,” Lassnig remarks, “just as life is!” Yet the absurdity never diminishes the vulnerability involved. The body remains both participant and witness to its own emotional exposure.

Soul Sisters Bärbl (1974) may be the most devastating of these portraits. Bärbl irons clothing, washes dishes, and drifts through depressive episodes while Lassnig speaks with startling lucidity about disappointment and endurance. The camera presses with painful intimacy, trembling slightly, refusing aesthetic comfort. Domestic life appears as a mechanism that slowly metabolizes ambition into fatigue. Yet Lassnig does not reduce Bärbl to victimhood. Her exhaustion contains philosophical force. “The world is good, even when it is bad,” she says, arriving at truth through attrition rather than transcendence.

This attention to the contradictory realities of embodiment runs throughout Lassnig’s engagement with feminism. She joined the Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc. collective in New York in 1974, though she always maintained a certain distance from organized ideological frameworks. Her vocabulary is unquestionably shaped by feminist consciousness, particularly in their refusal to eroticize the female body according to patriarchal conventions. Yet Lassnig resisted being enclosed within any singular category of “female artist.” She sought confrontation with the male-dominated European art world on equal terms, believing competition itself could generate artistic vitality. This give and take imbues Autumn Thoughts (1975), where a straitjacketed older woman wanders through forests and water while a young ballet dancer moves with liberated athleticism nearby, with historical burdens.

Other engagements with nature burrow into the subconscious. Kopf (Head, 1975) offers a fractured glimpse into inheritance and apparition. Lassnig places herself among paintings of her parents and earlier self-portraits, surrounding the present body with ancestral echoes that never fully release their hold. Faces drift between generations with uneasy permeability. A sculpted bust of the artist appears outdoors in stop-motion animation, rotating stiffly in the garden. Near the water’s edge, Lassnig wanders with the uncertainty of someone inhabiting several temporalities at once. The film’s stillness carries a peculiar dread, as if selfhood were always on the verge of dissolving back into the dust from which it emerged.

Mountain Woman is another outward examination. Filmed in Lassnig’s home province of Carinthia, in the mountainous village of Maltaberg, it observes the daily existence of a farmer moving through cycles of labor that appear both eternal and exhausting. Animals are fed, children are tended to, and tools are carried across unforgiving terrain. Yet the surrounding alpine beauty never softens the severity of survival, the mountains looming as ancient witnesses to repetition. As domestic life merges with geological time, the cyclical structure produces an uncanny distance, encouraging viewers to confront the comfort of spectatorship itself. Hardship persists whether or not it is being observed, drawing a line to other forgotten voices across space and time.

And yet, the issue was never whether Lassnig was a political artist. Rather, she operated by a relentless scrutiny of the unstable territory where sensation becomes character. Her practice understands that the body absorbs ideology before language ever articulates it. One sees this clearly in Black Dancer (1974), where Harry, a friend of Lassnig’s, moves with studied self-consciousness beneath (and outnumbered by) the hovering specters of a group of female ballet dancers layered through double exposure. The male body here becomes uneasy under scrutiny, transformed into an object whose visibility carries discomfort rather than mastery.

The same dissolution of fixed boundaries appears in Dog Film, one of her most unexpectedly tender creations. Dogs race through agility courses, lounge beside humans, lick faces, and intermingle through multiple exposures that gradually destabilize distinctions between species. At one point, a woman points to her own canine teeth while gazing into the camera, quietly acknowledging the animal architecture hidden within the human face itself. Lassnig treats instinct not as something primitive to overcome, but as a submerged continuity that binds living creatures together beneath civilization’s cosmetic surfaces.

Even when documenting external events, Lassnig transforms them into reflections on corporeal vulnerability. Nitsch (1972), filmed during a performance by Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch at New York’s Mercer Arts Center, combines grotesque ritual imagery with footage of the Vietnam War and convulsions from her neighbor Roger wearing a gas mask. Flesh dominates every frame. Bodies rupture, twitch, perform, and decay. Yet the work avoids sensationalism through its deeply personal framing. Lassnig inserts herself into the montage, implicating her own body within the violence being observed. Catastrophe is never far away.

In Godfather I (1974), shot around Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Lassnig wanders through transformed New York streets where period cars and storefronts create a sense of temporal disorientation. The mythology of masculine cinematic power surrounding Coppola’s production, which happened to take place right outside her apartment, dissolves beneath her gaze into something stranger and more unstable. Extras and bystanders become more fascinating than stars. Historical recreation folds into contemporary reality until the city itself feels uncertain of its own chronology.

There are moments when Lassnig reaches toward something resembling narrative, though even these gestures remain haunted by skepticism. The Princess and the Shepherd. A Fairytale (1976) presents a lonely princess whose tears are collected in jars while suitors fail repeatedly to stir her from emotional paralysis. Eventually, she follows the sound of a shepherd’s flute into pastoral simplicity. Yet the piece radiates unease beneath its mythic structure. Lassnig pauses scenes at unexpected moments, introducing ruptures that prevent surrender. Happiness itself begins to feel theatrical, a script inherited rather than believed. The film watches romance with exhausted suspicion.

Perhaps this is why Jocelyn Miller’s observation in her essay “Optical Printer” feels so central to understanding Lassnig’s achievement: “Whether making images from paint or celluloid, her art came from thinking with the body, enhancing and radically trusting her own vision so it entered not just through her eyes, but through a multiplicity of organs, even prosthetic machine parts like her camera.” Lassnig understood the moving image not as escape from corporeality, but as an extension of it. The camera became another organ through which sensation could pass. Her notebooks reveal this repeatedly. To render was to touch. To animate was to restore pulse to matter. The mechanical apparatus of recording never diminished her tactile relationship to artmaking. It intensified it.

This becomes especially moving when considered alongside her eventual estrangement from New York. Upon returning to Austria, Lassnig severed ties with much of her American life, including the unfinished films documented in this collection. Their rediscovery carries emotional complexity because they preserve states of becoming that Lassnig herself chose not to revisit publicly for decades. And yet, fulfillment in Lassnig’s universe never whispers finality. Nearness itself becomes the condition. Art preserves thirst even as it promises relief.

Such tensions become profoundly illuminating when placed beside the words of Deborah King, who writes: “The phrase, ‘the personal is political’ not only reflects a phenomenological approach to women’s liberation—that is, of women defining and constructing their own reality—but it has come to describe the politics of imposing and privileging a few women’s personal lives over all women’s lives by assuming that these few could be prototypical.” This sentiment reverberates through Lassnig’s output with unusual precision. Lassnig persistently resisted becoming symbolic. She distrusted the flattening effect of ideological legibility. Her body in never claims universality. It mutates with radical specificity.

This may ultimately be the charge of her uncompromising spirit. Lassnig understood that authenticity can itself become tyrannical when it is transformed into a representative expectation. The danger within identity discourse lies partly in the seduction of exemplary narratives, in the desire to convert singular experience into a collective template. Lassnig refuses this conversion at every turn. Her body-awareness is too unstable, too contradictory, too private to function comfortably as emblematic. She documents female experience without pretending to encompass womanhood itself.

That refusal grants her work extraordinary ethical openness. She does not instruct viewers how to interpret embodiment. She exposes embodiment as fundamentally unresolvable. Pain coexists with absurdity. Solitude drifts beside erotic uncertainty. Aging appears grotesque and luminous simultaneously. Domestic life suffocates while generating unexpected wisdom. Lassnig leaves all these tensions alive within the frame, resisting the cultural impulse to organize experience into moral clarity.

In this sense, she arrives at something stranger than autobiography. One watches her and begins to suspect that consciousness itself may simply be the scar tissue left by experience. Her images linger because they never stabilize into any definitive message. They remain vulnerable to reinterpretation, vulnerable even to themselves.

Perhaps that is why these works feel so startlingly contemporary. They understand, long before the language became fashionable, that visibility can become another form of confinement. To be seen too clearly is to risk becoming reducible. Lassnig protects herself from reduction through fragmentation, humor, grotesquerie, abstraction, and interruption.

And so, the lasting miracle of her oeuvre is not that it survived but that it survived without surrendering its instability. Her films still pulse with incompletion. They still behave as living organisms rather than inanimate artifacts. Watching them, one has the uncanny sensation that they are studying us in return, measuring our own thresholds, asking whether we, too, possess bodies we have never fully entered. Somewhere beneath all the overlays, all the fractured anatomies and unfinished gestures, Lassnig seems to suggest that a human being is not a fixed entity moving through time but a temporary congregation of sensations waiting briefly inside flesh before dispersing again into the dark.

Simone Dinnerstein review for Sequenza 21

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for Sequenza 21 is of pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s first album dedicated to the music of Philip Glass. Leading her string ensemble, Baroklyn, she charts the expansive waters of the composer’s suite from The Hours and the Tirol Concerto. Click the cover below to read more.

Friedl Kubelka: One Is Not Enough. Photography & Film (INDEX 049)

| Tyran Grillo

At the moon´s gloaming I like to look
At the grey metropolis, crumbling ruins
Which serve as a measure of its greatness
On which humans learn to measure themselves.
–Christian Friedrich Hebbel

There are artists who continually reinvent themselves in pursuit of freedom. Friedl Kubelka, who in moving pictures assumes the name Friedl vom Gröller, has instead devoted her life to the opposite challenge: remaining within the same existential setting long enough for its hidden cracks to show. Across more than five decades, she has returned obsessively to faces, apartments, lovers, strangers, aging skin, mirrors, city corners, and windows clouded by rain or breath. Her work unfolds through a deepening sort of recurrence. The same mysteries persist from decade to decade, altered only by time’s pressure upon flesh and memory. Looking through One Is Not Enough becomes less an encounter with an oeuvre than an immersion into a trembling human continuum where identity never settles into certainty. Every face seems temporarily assembled from other versions of itself. Every gesture feels inherited from forgotten rituals. Her art understands personality as something permanently unfinished, a surface endlessly rewritten by experience, desire, fatigue, and solitude.

Editor-curator Dietmar Schwärzler’s introductory essay, “Aging – An Ideal Condition,” frames Kubelka above all as a portraitist, though portraiture here undergoes a strange dissolution. Traditionally, the portrait seeks definition, some concentrated revelation of character. Kubelka, on the other hand, is a believer in accumulation. The title One Is Not Enough therefore names both a method and a philosophy. A single exposure cannot contain a life. One expression collapses beneath the weight of all the others pressing invisibly behind it. Her sequences unfold with the nervous rhythm of consciousness itself, every slight alteration in posture or gaze destabilizing what came before. Looking at her serial works feels uncannily close to remembering someone rather than observing them.

This sensibility reaches its most monumental articulation in Yearly Portraits, the lifelong self-documenting project she began in 1972, taking one picture of herself every day for a year and repeating the process every five years thereafter. Seen together, these constellations become devastating meditations on time’s physicality. Lovers appear in bed beside her. Friends crowd into cramped interiors. Cigarettes burn down. Hairstyles vanish into different eras. The body thickens, loosens, hardens, softens. Her face slowly acquires the density of hard-won wisdom. Yet the real force of the series lies in its refusal of vanity. Kubelka never offers herself as icon, nor as confession. She studies herself with the same merciless curiosity she directs toward everyone else. Some poses carry vulgarity, exhaustion, and erotic indifference. Others radiate fleeting joy before collapsing back into ambiguity. In one sense, the work documents aging. In another, it documents the terrifying instability of the self, how one drifts through countless versions of personhood without ever fully becoming any of them.

Elsewhere in the book, one encounters entire worlds compressed into sequences that refuse closure. The Thought series possesses a particularly startling intimacy. Kubelka records the micro fluctuations of consciousness itself while subjects respond internally to unseen stimuli. Her mother, Lore Bondy, listens to a 1945 Austrian National Council debate, her face moving through skepticism, sorrow, distraction, historical exhaustion. Her daughter drifts into daydreams so completely that nothing else seems to exist around her. These are not reactions in the ordinary sense. They feel closer to thought becoming visible before language can imprison it. One begins to understand how little of another person we ever truly perceive.

Even works that initially appear playful are scathing critiques of proof. Broadway, San Francisco (1974) arranges peep show signs into a rigid 9×9 grid pulsing with urban lust and commercial seduction, only for the lower left corner to quietly disclose Kubelka and her husband embracing in bed. The tenderness arrives almost accidentally, tucked beneath the machinery of desire capitalism projects across the city. Suddenly, the surrounding promises above appear hollowed out by genuine intimacy below. In another series, Sigmund Freud’s Waiting Room, Berggasse 19, psychoanalytic history lingers ghostlike through the furniture and walls. Kubelka photographs the room not as sacred site but as residue chamber, a place where traumas still seem suspended in the air long after the voices articulating them vanished.

Her portraits from Dakar and the Atelier d’Expression sequences achieve extraordinary emotional density through their attention to material surroundings. One artist appears swallowed by a tangle of brushes and artistic debris, his body half dissolving into the very process of creation. The clutter around him acquires psychic force, as though thought itself had externalized into objects. Other artists sit beside walls crowded with unfinished canvases, masks, scattered tools, traces of previous gestures. Kubelka understands studios as extensions of consciousness, environments where private mythologies gather physical form.

Throughout the book, geography operates as psychic signature. Rome, New York, Paris, Dakar, St. Louis, Piedmont: these emerge through fragments of walls, gestures, windows, and bodies caught in transitional states. Kubelka moves through these places as though searching for fleeting temperatures rather than permanent landmarks. One begins to recognize her visual language immediately. The frontal regard. The grain of black and white. The sense that every room has absorbed years of invisible conversations. Her portraits from Senegal resonate especially deeply because they reveal how instinctively she responds to artistic communities formed under historical pressure. The supplemental magazine dedicated to muralist Pape Mamadou Samb, known as Papisto Boy, extends this dimension beautifully. Papisto Boy transformed Dakar’s walls into public memory, covering them with revolutionary figures, laborers, anticolonial resisters, and saints of survival. His works possess both immediacy and erosion, forever exposed to neglect. Kubelka understands him not simply as a painter of walls but as someone wrestling history back into visibility. In the Bel-Air industrial zone, his depictions of Lat Dior resisting colonial rail expansion or Amílcar Cabral dreaming liberation from Portuguese domination become inseparable from the physical decay surrounding them. The paint may crack, but histories persist.

This tension between endurance and disappearance permeates the Dakar period of her filmmaking. 27.12.2013 St. Louis Senegal overlays faces and landscape in luminous double exposure so that fields seem to bloom from human interiors. Scars of European domination seep through sunlight. In Adama Diouf, the eponymous philosopher and teacher ambulates with extraordinary warmth, greeted by townspeople who clearly adore him. Kubelka follows him through markets crowded with fish, through streets layered in color and exhaustion, before drifting toward Papisto Boy’s murals and a worn Sartre paperback with a cracked spine adjusted carefully by hand. Madeleine Bernstorff describes Kubelka’s portraiture as balancing relations “with a touch behind the camera,” and nowhere is this clearer than here. Diouf’s gaze possesses immense vulnerability. He seems simultaneously present and already receding into memory.

What strikes one immediately upon entering Kubelka’s spaces is their multiplicity. Her sequences do not narrow possibilities toward a definitive representation, as fashion contact sheets do. They proliferate uncertainty. A soul emerges through contradiction, through accumulation, through micro-expressions that undermine one another. Whether she turns toward towering creative figures such as Eric Rohmer, Kenneth Anger, or Shigeko Kubota, or toward anonymous strangers, everyone receives the same trembling attention. Her black-and-white studies carry an almost tactile grain, the faces emerging from darkness with the force of remembered dreams. Even singular works feel accompanied by invisible doubles, echoes reverberating behind the visible surface.

Eva, Bigi, Louise (1984) channels an earthy sensuality that recalls the physical candor of Sally Mann, while the Allegory montages from 2014 summon the spectral theatricality of Julia Margaret Cameron. Women draped in cloth and shadow drift through tableaux poised between myth and domesticity. Kubelka moves fluidly between registers without sacrificing coherence. She possesses a profoundly adaptive eye, capable of becoming severe, erotic, mournful, and mischievous within the span of a few pages.

Shadows, Louvre from 2014 may be among her most distilled achievements. Rather than recording the sculptures themselves, she focuses entirely upon their shadows cast across museum walls by artificial light. Civilization survives as intangible residue. Form becomes absence. Presence flickers through disappearance. The world leaves behind silhouettes of itself.

The moving works included in this INDEX edition deepen these obsessions while complicating them through duration and motion. Kubelka’s camera lingers where most directors would cut away. She gravitates toward moments usually discarded as transitional or awkward. In Ma peau précieuse (My Precious Skin), grainy black and white textures smear across the frame while two older women converse outside. Soon the lens presses brutally close to bathroom cosmetics and wrinkled flesh. Dian Turnheim massages products into her face with ritualistic concentration. The closer Kubelka moves toward the skin, the more absurd beauty culture becomes. After swimming in the ocean, the woman returns to her yard and silently mouths “Stop!” toward the camera, as though addressing both the act of filming and the erosion of time.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent transforms seven older women behind a chain link fence into an almost mythic collective presence. Their expressions remain unreadable, suspended somewhere between accusation and exhaustion. When Kubelka inserts herself among them and turns toward the others, the gesture feels startlingly intimate, a breach of invisible codes. The close-ups that follow allow the viewer to image lifetimes of sorrow, companionship, betrayal, and endurance. The absence of context enlarges the psychic field rather than diminishing it.

In 66, rue Stephenson, a young woman dances before an open window overlooking the noise of Paris below. Cars, trains, pedestrians pulse beneath her private joy. Exterior chaos gives way to interior refuge as Kubelka later explores the woman’s modest kitchen. The apartment becomes a temporary sanctuary against the world’s relentless machinery.

Poetry for Sale offers one of the collection’s sharpest meditations on artistic survival. Poet Mark Tapley writes beside an open window while attempts at seduction from his embodied muse irritate rather than entice him. Later, his rapid voice floods the Paris Métro as he hawks poems to indifferent passengers. The sudden eruption of sound after extended silence feels almost violent. Tapley’s desperation radiates through every gesture. Then comes a fleeting embrace from a young punk, and suddenly the entire emotional atmosphere shifts. Kubelka understands how fragile artistic affirmation can be, how entire lives hinge upon brief moments of recognition.

This melancholy deepens in THE PARIS POETRY CIRCLE, where poets gather to read aloud while Kubelka studies their faces with hypnotic patience. Voices emerge from bodies that appear isolated even in company. Rather than treating the face as psychological map, she transforms it into a conduit through which solitude passes between people.

Several works confront voyeurism directly. Im Wiener Prater initially appears observational, following the artist Martina L. through snowy woods with restless anticipation. A tripod and backpack in the snow expose the apparatus behind image making itself. The camera’s desire becomes unmistakable, even predatory. When Martina urinates directly toward the lens, vision collapses into humiliation. The viewer’s voyeurism receives its answer materially. Kubelka contaminates the gaze with a byproduct of the very body it sought to master.

Kirschenzeit (Cherries) stages erotic intimacy with remarkable tonal complexity. A chambermaid watches a couple dressing in corsets and latex before serving them cherries during lovemaking. The atmosphere oscillates between tenderness, theatricality, absurd ritual. The bodies exist within a liminal state, no longer young yet not fully old, suspended at the threshold where eroticism acquires melancholy depth.

In Das neue Kostüm (The New Suit), Kubelka prepares for the Austrian State Prize for Photography while being fitted for clothing inside her psychoanalytic office. Family members drift through the space. Her daughter begins taking stills after the 16mm camera breaks. The accidental transition fragments time into isolated moments of charged domesticity. Nothing overtly dramatic occurs, yet the atmosphere feels profoundly intimate, almost forbidden in its ordinariness. Kubelka waving her hands to stop recording as light floods the frame becomes strangely moving, a reminder that privacy survives even within acts of sharing.

Aging and familial continuity reach devastating emotional force in NEC SPE, NEC METU. Kubelka revisits her mother in a nursing home where flashes of recognition emerge briefly through blankness. Distortions of light break across the frame unpredictably. A baby’s arm reaches toward the elderly woman’s face. The work closes on the head of a Greek statue, linking antiquity, bodily decline, memory, and inheritance, all of the coexisting inside one trembling continuum.

Elsewhere, Kubelka pursues entirely emotional registers without losing coherence. Ruhe auf der Leinwand (Silence on the Screen) studies a painted portrait by Otto Riedel until the act of looking becomes reciprocal. Empört Euch! (Time for Outrage!) traps a boa constrictor within mirrored enclosures, transforming capitalism into a suffocating serpent consuming both prey and spectator. Maschile. Roma moves across men’s faces from varying social classes before ending on a Roman fountain vomiting water endlessly into distortion. In Rome peers through the shooting slits of Castel Sant’Angelo at passing pedestrians, juxtaposing architecture with fragments of her husband’s aging body until the city itself feels voyeuristic. Ticino follows river worn driftwood gathered by children, turning nature into unconscious sculptor. Winter in Paris transforms scaffolding outside a window into fractured abstraction before revealing the muscular presence of a worker whose body becomes an object of fascination. Later, Kubelka embraces a figure wearing a hat and a grotesque mask, death and tenderness momentarily fused.

The longest piece here, Atelier d’Expression, may also be the collection’s emotional center. Set in a Dakar psychiatric workshop, it portrays seven artists alongside their creations with extraordinary patience and dignity. Omar N’Diaye, deaf and intensely expressive, explains one of his paintings in sign language: a bitten foot emerging from a cracked egg beneath a moon-faced witness. Other canvases teem with eyes, fragmented anatomy, dislocated times and places. Kubelka cuts between artworks, faces, and beach wrestlers tracing marks into sand, inner turmoil migrating outward into material form.

What ultimately distinguishes Kubelka is the ethical force of sustained attention. She keeps looking after most people would stop looking. Her work resists acceleration and the contemporary demand that visual culture deliver immediate legibility, resembling not an archive but an alternative system of timekeeping measured through intervals of attention. The central theme is clear: memory does not preserve us because preservation was never possible. We thrive instead through continual reappearance inside other people’s perceptions, becoming echoes carried unknowingly forward. Somewhere beyond every frame, after the shutter closes and the projector falls dark, the unfinished self continues wandering through the eyes of strangers.

Joe Lovano: Paramount Quartet (ECM 2855)

| Tyran Grillo

Joe Lovano
Paramount Quartet

Joe Lovano tenor and G mezzo soprano saxophones, tarogato
Julian Lage guitar
Asante Santi Debriano double bass
Will Calhoun drums
Recorded February 2025 at Studios La Buissone
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: May 29, 2026

Since making his ECM debut on Paul Motian’s Psalm in 1981, saxophonist Joe Lovano has carried himself like an artist forever standing at the threshold of another doorway, one hand still touching the past while the other disappears into a future no one can predict. His discography refuses the comfort of a straight line. One hears instead a constellation, each recording illuminating a different contour of the same restless spirit. Whether navigating post-bop abstraction, folk lyricism, or the broad geometry that ECM has so often cultivated as its own secret dialect, Lovano approaches reinvention as a moral condition. Paramount Quartet, his new collaboration with guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Asante Santi Debriano, and drummer Will Calhoun, deepens that philosophy into something cartographic. The music feels concerned with passage itself: migration between traditions, between cities, between inwardness and communion. Lovano has described the ensemble as carrying “a real global awareness,” yet the phrase barely contains the sensation of listening to these musicians move through one another’s instincts. After meeting Debriano and Calhoun at a 2023 fundraiser for Puerto Rican hurricane relief, Lovano recognized a current already running beneath the conversation. Bringing Lage into the fold, after nearly two decades of imagined possibilities, completed the circuit with uncanny inevitability.

Lage, making his own ECM debut here, plays with remarkable translucence. His guitar rarely announces itself as accompaniment because it is atmosphere incarnate, altering the temperature of every phrase around it. Sometimes he arrives as a flicker in the corner of the eye, a filament of thought stretching across Lovano’s meditations. Elsewhere, he becomes startlingly corporeal, dragging steel across silence until the music smells faintly of rain striking hot pavement. There is an almost frightening sincerity in his touch.

Lovano’s longstanding affection for Charlie Haden’s “First Song” finally finds its ideal habitat here. The performance opens with Lage casting chords into the darkness like silver coins into black water, each ripple widening across the band’s collective breath. Lovano enters without ceremony, his tenor carrying the grain of memory itself. The sound feels lived in, rain-stained, touched by years that no longer separate grief from tenderness. He does not merely interpret the melody so much as trace his fingers across the cracks in its walls. Debriano and Calhoun move beneath him with exquisite patience, allowing an underlying emotional gravity to reveal itself slowly. What lingers is not melancholy exactly, but the strange warmth of realizing how loneliness can preserve the shape of love long after language has failed it.

“Amsterdam” shifts the perspective dramatically, opening onto a landscape of reflective surfaces and impossible angles. The quartet navigates the piece as nocturnal pedestrians crossing bridges slick with electric glow. Lovano’s improvisational logic slithers through the composition with reptilian elegance, hugging corners, vanishing into harmonic crevices before reappearing somewhere unforeseen. Debriano’s solo unfolds with muscular lyricism against Calhoun’s finely threaded percussion, each note carrying the heft of wrought iron suspended above moving canals. Lage responds by loosening the tune’s internal knots until his phrases spiral outward in widening rings. The titular city gradually ceases to feel geographical, becoming a psychic terrain assembled from fragments and sleepless reflections.

“The Call” draws us inward again. The chamber-like interplay between saxophone and guitar generates harmonies of microscopic precision whose emotional consequences feel almost cosmic. Debriano’s arco bass darkens the atmosphere with strokes that resemble charcoal dragged across damp stone. Lovano’s movement between reeds produces ghostly impressions at the edge of perception, subtle hauntings that alter the barometric pressure of the room without announcing their arrival. Ideas dissolve before they can fully materialize, replaced by others equally transient. Listening becomes an act of wandering through unfinished corridors where every open door reveals another unanswered question waiting patiently in half-light.

“Fanfare for Unity” erupts with kinetic exuberance, though even at its most rhythmically charged, the quartet avoids simple catharsis. Calhoun presides over the track with dazzling elasticity, shaping pulse into something simultaneously grounded and volatile. Beneath Lovano’s acrobatic phrasing, Lage stretches harmonic thread into intricate lattices that shimmer on the verge of collapse. His solo arrives like a sudden burst of graffiti across concrete, angular and luminous and impossible to ignore. Yet what makes the performance resonate beyond technical brilliance is the sense of collective trust animating every turn. The musicians lean toward one another with fearless attentiveness, creating a music that swings hard while retaining the vulnerability of open conversation.

Wayne Shorter’s “Lady Day” receives perhaps the album’s most psychologically expansive reading. Lage introduces the piece with reverential restraint, leaving enough space around each chord for silence to gather its own emotional residue. Lovano responds with phrasing that feels almost autobiographical, every note carrying the weight of private reckonings never fully disclosed. The quartet approaches the composition from within its emotional bloodstream rather than from its exterior form. Seasons seem to pass through in miniature, tiny climates of sorrow and resilience blooming and fading in the same breath. Lage’s counterpoint hovers beside Lovano like a second soul, intimate without imitation, shadowing the saxophonist’s movements while preserving the integrity of his own distinct language.

“The Great Outdoors” channels a life force unmistakably indebted to Motian, though the influence surfaces less in imitation than in attitude. The tune drifts with loose-limbed intuition. Each musician contributes with striking equality, allowing the composition to evolve communally rather than hierarchically. Lage sounds especially liberated here, his lines bouncing with almost childlike wonder, while Lovano pulls rougher-hewn textures from his horn. The music evokes open air without lapsing into pastoral cliché. One hears instead the wilderness of consciousness itself, untamed pathways winding through instinct and recollection.

By the time “Congregation” arrives, the album has already transformed fellowship into something sacred without ever announcing sacredness as its destination. The track glides forward with disarming warmth, its rhythmic ease carrying the listener into an atmosphere of genuine collective presence. There is joy here, certainly, though it is the kind born from survival rather than naïveté. The quartet sounds profoundly at ease inside one another’s company, every gesture shaped by trust accumulated in real time. Yet beneath the celebratory surface runs a quieter revelation. As the music fades, one begins to sense that the album has never truly been about collaboration at all. What Lovano and company uncover across these performances is the fragile miracle of permeability, the terrifying possibility that identity itself may only exist through continual exchange with others. Every solo becomes a temporary shelter built inside another person’s listening. Every rhythm carries fingerprints from elsewhere. By the end, the quartet no longer resembles four musicians negotiating shared space. They sound like evidence that self-awareness may itself be communal, that somewhere beneath the noise of individuality there exists a deeper reservoir where all voices dissolve into one trembling human breath moving through darkness toward whatever waits beyond it.

Alfred Kaiser: Decomposing Nazi Phraseology (INDEX 050)

| Tyran Grillo

When Alfred Kaiser first unveiled Ein drittes Reich (A Third Reich, 1975) and Ein drittes Reich aus seinem Abfall (A Third Reich from Its Refuse, 1977) near the close of the 1970s, his name carried none of the institutional weight that often cushions difficult art. Yet these films announced themselves with startling authority, assembling from the wreckage of Nazi image culture a pair of works so rigorous, so corrosively lucid, that they seemed less edited than excavated. Kaiser worked exclusively with material produced during the Third Reich itself, fashioning a cinema of diseased memory from propaganda reels, industrial films, amateur footage, educational shorts, and features. The achievement recalls the dialectical brilliance of Jean-Luc Godard at his most severe, especially in its use of sound and its archaeological chill. Every splice is a brush uncovering bone. Each cut reveals another layer of ideological sediment hardened into spectacle.

What emerges across both films is a study of seduction. Kaiser does not merely expose propaganda as deception. He understands that fascism first enters the bloodstream as longing. The camera under National Socialism adored surfaces with devotional intensity. Flesh, architecture, wheat, steel, children, rivers, flags, and clouds: all of these projection surfaces glow with the fatal glamour of belonging. Kaiser takes them seriously enough to let them betray themselves. He grants them space to speak in their own poisoned tongue until their ecstasies curdle into confession, séances conducted in the language of seduction itself.

Born in Vienna in 1940, Kaiser came of age among artists determined to confront the psychic debris left scattered across postwar Europe. He moved within a circle that included Hermann Nitsch and Peter Kubelka, the latter becoming both mentor and catalyst. Kubelka’s influence stretched beyond aesthetics into the very material conditions of Kaiser’s practice. Under the auspices of the Austrian Film Museum, which Kubelka co-founded, Kaiser gained extraordinary access to archival holdings from the Nazi era. Constantin Wulff’s illuminating liner notes for this INDEX edition recount how the museum organized its landmark retrospective “Propaganda and Counterpropaganda in Film from 1933 to 1945,” a program juxtaposing works from Nazi Germany with Allied propaganda films. The series dissolved comforting moral distances between victor and vanquished, insisting instead on a universal machinery of persuasion. One senses Kaiser absorbing this revelation as a grammar lurking within modernity itself. 

At the museum, Kaiser studied these archives frame by frame at the editing table, touching history at its cellular level. The process must have resembled an encounter with a haunted alphabet. He had already wrestled with Nazi aesthetics through painting and writing, most notably in his extraordinary Hitler watercolor series produced between 1974 and 1975 (included here as a DVD extra), where the dictator’s likeness was filtered through the vocabularies of art history, from classical portraiture to pop art vulgarity. Yet cinema gave Kaiser something painting could not: the tremor between image and sound where ideology often hides its deepest impulses.

A Third Reich unfolds like a hallucination narrated by the regime itself. An arrow plunges into the sea. Wheat fields writhe beneath invisible winds. Bodies appear less human than agricultural, cultivated toward some impossible purity. Kaiser arranges these elements with terrifying precision, allowing associations to bloom and decay within the viewer’s mind. The Reich’s obsession with fertility and physical perfection acquires a mythic texture, as though fascism dreamed of transforming society into one endless reproductive ritual. Men become engines. Women become vessels. Childhood stretches toward militarization with dreadful inevitability, every stage of life absorbed into the geometry of obedience.

The brilliance of Kaiser’s montage lies in its refusal of explanatory comfort. Meaning accumulates through pressure rather than argument. Trees crash violently to the ground while voices extol unity and destiny. Soldiers grin with frightening innocence as war approaches. Factories pulse with infernal vitality. Steel glimmers as sacrament. At one moment, the interior of a cathedral appears while gunfire echoes across the soundtrack, the holy collapsing seamlessly into mechanized death. Elsewhere, calf slaughter collides with laughter, flesh reduced to material amid communal joy. The regime’s rhetoric of life, truth, freedom, and labor becomes nothing more than a vain repetition. Words lose semantic stability and become rhythmic instruments designed to anesthetize thought itself. By the time cries of “Heil!” erupt into darkness, our endurance is tested.

Kaiser understood that fascism aestheticizes continuity above all else. It promises a seamless world where contradiction dissolves into collective purpose. Masculinity flows from boyhood into soldierhood without rupture. Industry merges with nationalism. Sexuality merges with reproduction. Nature merges with conquest. Even death becomes assimilated into a narrative of purification. The horror resides partly in the elegance of the construction. National Socialism dreamed of eliminating ambiguity from existence. Kaiser restores ambiguity to every frame as a necessary contagion.

A Third Reich from Its Refuse pushes these ideas into stranger and more intimate territory. If the earlier project resembles an autopsy, the latter behaves like a fever dream assembled from cultural leftovers. Spoken slogans recede. Definitive montage structures collapse. Pop songs drift across sequences of fascist pomp with unnerving tenderness, producing emotional dissonances that feel almost unbearable. Kaiser reportedly wished the film screened only within a “private circle,” an instruction that lends an atmosphere of forbidden correspondence passed secretly between survivors of some psychic catastrophe. 

The camera circles beauty obsessively. Women exercise gracefully beneath skies emptied of consequence. Hitler appears smiling, delighted by his own reflection mirrored in adoring crowds. Consumption becomes ritualized, whether of food, entertainment, labor, or bodies. Everything shimmers with the narcotic glow of satisfaction. Yet beneath this choreography of pleasure lies an abyss. Kaiser reveals how fascism feeds upon the human desire to escape uncertainty. The regime offers paradise through simplification and meaning through surrender.

What makes the proceedings so unsettling is their musicality. Historical horrors return with altered emotional coloration, as though the unconscious were remixing memory itself. The effect resembles wandering through a ballroom erected atop a mass grave while old love songs continue to play from another room. Kaiser understands that ideology rarely survives through terror alone. It survives because it learns how to dance.

INDEX’s timely release restores these monumental works with extraordinary care, allowing contemporary viewers to encounter something startlingly singular within the history of essay cinema and found footage experimentation. Kaiser’s achievement extends beyond political critique into something far more difficult to articulate. He reveals a battleground between revelation and hypnosis. The moving image can illuminate consciousness or dissolve it. Projection becomes a moral event.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of Kaiser’s films lies in their refusal to reassure. They offer no triumphant distance from the past, no comforting implication that modern viewers stand safely outside these mechanisms of enchantment. The Reich appears here not as a historical anomaly but as concentrated dream logic, one expression of humanity’s endless appetite for coherence, purity, and transcendence. Kaiser peers directly into that appetite without blinking.

In the end, we are left with the peculiar silence that follows after language has exhausted its disguises. One begins to sense history not as chronology but as atmosphere, something breathed unconsciously across generations. Kaiser reminds us that civilizations often perish long before their buildings collapse. They decay first in metaphor, in tempo, in the stories they tell themselves while marching toward catastrophe with radiant smiles upon their faces. And when the masks fall away, the skeletons left behind look no different than those of their victims.