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.
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.
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.
Dine Doneff double bass, percussion, lute, classical guitar, tambura, voice Takis Farazis piano, accordion, voice Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra Dimos Dimitriadis flute, saxophone Dany Hayes trumpet Melina Kana voice Maria Thoidou voice Takis Kanelos drums Manos Achalinotopoulos clarinet Dimitris Chalkias clarinet Dimitris Christidis trumpet Nikos Kollias Tantsis trombone Pantelis Benetatos piano Nikos Sidirokastritis drums Michalis Siganidis double bass Recording Engineer: Yannis Tsambazis Polytropon Studio, Thessaloniki – November 1995 Dany Hayes was recorded in Silverbold Studios, New York (1996) Work Arranger: Dine Doneff Cover: Fotini Potamia Mastering: Chris Hadjistamou, Athens Mastering First release by LYRA (Athens) June 1999 Producer: Dine Doneff
Nostos marks the opening chapter in a trilogy that has since come to define the mature voice of multi-instrumentalist and composer Dine Doneff. First released in 1999 on the Athens-based LYRA label and later rehomed by Doneff’s own neRED imprint, it is a recording that reveals more of itself with each return. Its thematic concerns, tonal palette, and ethical orientation radiate forward through Rousilvo and culminate in Doudoule. In hindsight, this debut installment feels less like a preface than a generative source.
Its title announces the central concept of return, understood not simply as physical homecoming but as a confrontation with memory, loss, and belonging. Doneff shapes this idea across two broad arcs spanning nine pieces, tracing a passage from encounter to separation and from outward motion toward interior reckoning. In doing so, the recording situates itself within the continuum of world music not as a stylistic mosaic but as a lived conversation, where Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean, jazz, and modal traditions coexist without hierarchy or pastiche.
The opening sequence begins with a spare invocation. A solitary lute establishes an atmosphere of distance and ancestry, carrying a gravity that binds the personal to the collective. From this threshold emerges an intimate convergence of timbres rather than a declarative statement. Doneff’s percussion entwines with the lyra of Sokratis Sinopoulos, while Takis Farazis’s piano follows a parallel route, at times aligning, at times drifting away. Melina Kana’s wordless vocal presence introduces warmth without tethering expression to language. What surfaces here is not certainty, but a shared willingness to move together even as divergence remains inevitable.
As the record broadens, its physical presence becomes more pronounced. Rhythms drawn from tabla and hand percussion root the sound in bodily motion, while winds and brass stretch the frame outward. The flute of Dimos Dimitriadis and the trumpet of Dany Hayes sweep across a textured accordion field shaped by Farazis, until abstraction gives way to something tactile and immediate. The audible stamp of Doneff’s boots on the studio floor, joined by voices and clapping, anchors the performance in lived space. This is tradition not preserved in frame, but reanimated through breath, movement, and communal energy.
That sense of shared experience crests in the dance-centered passages. Supported by Doneff alongside drummer Takis Kanelos, a gathering of horns and reeds conjures a celebration that feels simultaneously rooted and unbounded. Dimitriadis on saxophone and Manos Achalinotopoulos on clarinet take spirited turns as extensions of a collective pulse.
As expected, the trajectory turns toward parting. The midpoint recognizes separation as a necessary counterbalance to union. When the latter half of the program begins, attention shifts inward. With Nikos Sidirokastritis on drums and Doneff on bass, restraint and equilibrium come to the fore, favoring coexistence over confrontation. The ensuing voyage unfolds with patience, introduced by a fragile, minor-key piano figure. Brass and saxophone gain strength through persistence rather than force, their lines etched like accumulated experience into the terrain. Farazis’s solo, supported by Sidirokastritis’s tactile rhythmic foundation, arrives with a sense of earned reflection.
The closing stretch resists easy resolution. Interlaced basses, voice, piano, and accordion form a slow, shadowed progression that edges toward closure even as it slips away. Maria Thoidou’s vocal presence hovers between lament and affirmation, acknowledging that return is never a simple reversal. What follows is an uncertain space where meaning remains unsettled.
The final gesture stands alone, with Farazis at the piano. In a brief span, the closing piece compresses entire lives into touch and resonance. It suggests solitude without despair, remembrance without sentimentality. If Nostos offers a lesson, it is that return does not restore what has vanished, nor does it annul distance traveled. Instead, it proposes a way of carrying lived experience forward.
Within the wider terrain of world music, Nostos already signals Doneff’s refusal to exoticize tradition or flatten difference. His evolution as a composer and performer begins here with an ethic of attention, treating sound as a site of encounter rather than assertion. The recording does not argue for unity as sameness or identity as enclosure. It gestures toward something quieter and more enduring: that belonging is shaped through movement, through departure as much as arrival, and through the humility to return altered. In that sense, Nostos remains deliberately open-ended, continuing to resonate wherever listeners recognize themselves in its unfolding path.
Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, mandola, tambura, piano, organ, percussion, and tapes Kyriakos Gouventas violin on “Flow” Main corpus of recordings: MK Studio, Munich Müncher Kammerspiele – December 29, 2018 Engineer: Johann Jürgen Koch Additional recordings: Vertekop Studio – 2019 Engineer: Pande Noushin Mixed and edited by Dine Doneff Domagk Cell 27, Munich – May 2025 Mastering: Christoph Stickel Cover artwork: Fotini Potamia Produced by Dine Doneff
We Macedonians will not live in fear The time will come, and we’ll sing our old song, again.
Those lines run through Roden Voden like roots growing in the earth. They function neither as a slogan nor as a promise easily fulfilled, sounding instead as something learned under pressure, after history has already exacted its toll. In this sense, Dine Doneff’s concluding chapter in a trilogy that began with Nostos in 1995 and continued through Rousilvo in 2004 does not simply present music. It stages a reckoning. The album listens backward into time, gathering voices recorded between 1991 and 2009 in Rousilvo, Ostrovo, Ts’rnessovo, and Voden, Greece, and carries them forward into the present, where memory, erasure, and survival collide.
Macedonia’s modern history is marked by fragmentation, forced silences, renamings, and borders drawn without regard for the lives lived along them. Languages were pressured into retreat. Songs were sung quietly, or only at home, if at all. Roden Voden treats these conditions as active forces shaping every sound. Doneff’s original compositions do not dominate the archival material. They surround it, support it, and sometimes unsettle it, as though the music itself were asking how an inheritance scarred by violence can be carried without being embalmed.
The album opens its first vocal threshold with “Spell,” voiced and written by Vane Indiff (b. 1944). The poem abandons narrative in favor of invocation. Natural forces, measures of time, mythic presences, and ancestral peoples accumulate in a relentless cadence that feels closer to ritual than to verse. Language becomes a circle drawn to awaken a world that has been dispersed. The poem does not describe resurrection. It attempts it, using repetition and breath as tools of release.
Such ritual gravity strengthens with “Zhalaj me Majko,” sung by Slava Pop’va (b. 1927). This folk song unfolds as a quiet lament shaped by exile and unspoken longing. Its melody lilts and never fully settles, searching for reassurance of love in a land that does not recognize her. Addressed to a distant mother, the song carries the weight of a year spent loving in silence. Devotion here is intense but unseen, and by the final lines, it is no longer an emotion but a fatal condition. What remains is a spare, devastating cry that transforms private despair into communal mourning.
“Kirka,” another text by Indiff, fractures time and meaning even further. The poem constructs its logic from color, the everyday, and the body rather than from a story. An almost childlike order is established before being obliterated by the abrupt fact of death as the self is reduced to wood, fire, and branches. Innocence and physicality collide without romanticism. Loss is rendered through disjointed fragments that resist consolation, insisting instead on the rawness of what remains.
Collective tragedy takes center stage in “Dve Tri Poushki,” rendered by Neshka Ts’rnessova (b. 1925). The song distills catastrophe into stark repetition. Rifles are counted. Fallen youths are counted. Grieving mothers are counted. Loss is now the only measure, allowing the song to move from sudden violence toward an enduring lament that binds faith and pain.
The political heart of the album asserts itself most directly in “Censored Memory,” to which Doneff contributes percussion, strings, and a poem in Greek. At the center lies “Oj Lele Brate mi Tane,” a song about Tane Stojchev Kljandzev (1874-1907) from Gornitschevo, leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation in Lerin (Florina). Memory here is not merely fragile. It is actively suppressed. By layering languages, voices, and historical reference, the track refuses singular authority and exposes history as something perpetually contested, shaped as much by silence as by speech.
“Nubeti” returns to the terrain of intimate loss. The folk song that follows unfolds as a dialogue between generations. A young widow carries her wedding crown as a relic of happiness interrupted. The mother speaks in the cadence of continuity and social expectation, while the daughter rejects comfort, insisting on the singularity of her grief. Survival and fidelity are placed in quiet opposition, and the song refuses to resolve the tension between them.
“Prikazni” unfolds as a dense, dreamlike collage where landscape, memory, and lament bleed into one another. Mountains, lakes, and weather respond like wounded witnesses to human violence and erasure. Personal cries of love and death interrupt the natural imagery, giving way again to familial grief and village memory. The verses move by emotional association rather than linear sense, capturing a world fractured by loss, where love, labor, war, and dispossession sound together for both the living and the dead.
“Narrative” gathers three texts into a single arc. “Stojna,” voiced by Stojan Gjorgiff (b. 1913), compresses catastrophe into a stark moral tableau where reproach and irreversible action collide in a single breath. Its restraint leaves the listener suspended in an unresolved aftermath. “Stara Panoukla,” sung by T’rpa Tanva Noushna (b. 1905), begins with pastoral tenderness before revealing a plague disguised as an old woman, death entering through the most ordinary gestures. “Dzemo,” sung by Tome Bojn (b. 1929), recounts the revenge killing of Dzhemail Aga, grounding historical violence in personal memory and inherited grievance. Together, these songs demonstrate how folk tradition carries ethics, fear, and justice as lived knowledge.
Threaded between these exhalations are extended wordless spaces where Doneff’s instrumental pieces function as corridors between testimonies. “Flow” opens this terrain with a radiant spread of piano, laying out a landscape where the living and the dead move together. Mandola and tombak provide traction, while a violin lifts memory skyward toward something unforgotten. “Prism” refracts emotion into color, turning sound into touch, a moment of fragile wonder. “Monologue,” an arco double bass solo, is a meditation on loss already named, allowing sorrow to resonate and slowly quiet. “Ghosts of Freedom” lingers with spectral patience, giving shape to implications too heavy for words. “Meglen” serves as connective tissue, bass and percussion sketching a passage rather than a destination. The title track itself emerges from ambient sounds recorded at the cemetery of Rousilvo, dissolving the boundary between presence and absence. “Ni Tvoj Ni Moj,” also rendered via the bow, strips a traditional ballad to its emotional bone. “Pepel” closes the album with classical guitar, light percussion, and the sound of locals speaking bilingually in Macedonian and Greek about atrocities suffered in Edessa Voden during the late 1940s. These unpolished voices do not seek resolution. They exist as ash does, settled, persistent, unavoidable.
Roden Voden matters because it refuses to let history become abstraction. These recordings are not artifacts sealed behind glass. They breathe, falter, contradict, and endure. By interweaving them with contemporary composition, Doneff does not attempt to heal the past. The album suggests that remembrance is not about closure or reclaiming a pure origin. It is about staying with what is difficult, listening without impatience, and recognizing that perseverance often sounds like an unfinished song. In the end, the album does not ask us to remember more clearly but more honestly and to accept that even in fear, even in silence, the old song awaits.
Tom Arthurs trumpet Antonis Anissegos piano, prepared piano Stamatis Pasopoulos bayan Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, percussion, vocals Recorded live at Stadtkirche, Rudolstadt July 6, 2014 Editing: Tome Rapovina Mastering: Kostas Kontos Cover/Design: Fotini Potamia Produced by Dine Doneff
Doudoule begins as a quiet act of assembly, four distinct presences finding one another in real time. Dine Doneff’s bass sets the initial pulse, opening space rather than filling it. Tom Arthurs’ trumpet waits, listening before speaking, attentive to what is already forming around him. Antonis Anissegos approaches from another angle, his piano ready to shift the ground beneath with a single chord or sudden flight. Stamatis Pasopoulos completes the circle with the bayan, an instrument that breathes history and air into the room. Together, they sound less like a band stepping onstage than a conversation already underway, one the listener joins midway, aware that something patient, communal, and deeply human is about to unfold.
“Faces” opens the path. The bass speaks first, soft yet resolute, shaping a malleable mood. It carries light and shade together, suggesting that resolution and doubt are not opposites but companions. Piano chords appear as careful steps across uncertain terrain, each one placed with trust. When the trumpet finally enters, it does so without force, a gradual illumination rather than a flare. The bayan stirs, completing a scene that feels rural and inward, as if fields and sky were meeting inside the music. Nothing fully resolves. The clouds linger at the edges, a reminder of unfinished thoughts and unarticulated concerns. Anissegos’s piano moves between closeness and distance, shifting the listener’s vantage point again and again, teaching us how easily perspective can change without warning.
“Meglen” follows with a different posture. The bass intro here is more angular, almost architectural, yet it breathes freely, allowing swing to bend its lines. From this foundation, a broad and generous theme blooms. The quartet sounds fully assembled now. The trumpet rises with clarity and calm assurance, drawing the listener into a melodic current that feels warming and protective. There is a sense of shelter in this piece, of sound offered as refuge during a cold season. The group’s union becomes palpable, each instrument reinforcing the others without obscuring their character.
The title track moves the goal post once more. It opens playfully, the bass again leading, but this time with a more elastic, inviting tone. Rhythm loosens its grip, allowing the bayan and piano to dance into view. The music becomes communal and animated, buoyed by chant-like vocalizations. There is joy here, but it is grounded rather than ecstatic. Arthurs takes flight above the rhythm, yet never loses contact with what lies below. His trumpet feels like a collective voice lifted skyward. Form and feeling intertwine so closely that they become indistinguishable.
With “Rite of Passage,” the album turns inward. Bass and bayan blend into a more somber hue, their lines tinged with reflection and quiet gravity. A dialogue emerges between bass and trumpet, intimate and exposed, as if the music were speaking directly to its own origins. This exchange reaches toward something essential in Doneff’s musical ethos, a belief in honesty over ornament, in vulnerability as strength. The piece then transforms, slipping into a dreamlike terrain shaped by prepared piano and percussive textures. The familiar dissolves, and what remains is a sense of standing between what has been known and what has yet to take shape.
Last is “Prolet,” where the surreal elements continue to expand before slowly converging. Themes gather as if guided by an unseen gravity, aligning themselves into a closing statement that feels earned rather than imposed. Doneff’s guitar and subtle percussion trace fleeting highlights through the texture, like sunlight catching on distant landscapes glimpsed in sleep. These sounds do not point backward so much as outward, toward places imagined and possibilities still forming.
In its final moments, Doudoule resists the temptation to summarize itself. Instead, it opens a quiet question: How does a shared journey reshape those who walk it together? The music suggests that meaning is found in the very act of listening, in remaining attentive to change and to one another. As the last tones fade, what lingers is awareness, a sense that the path continues beyond the performance, carried forward in memory and in the next act of collective creation.
Thomas Strønen drums Ayumi Tanaka piano Håkon Aase violin Leo Svensson Sander violoncello Ole Morten Vågen double bass Recorded December 2021 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo Engineer: Peer Espen Ursfjord Mixed July 2024 by Manfred Eicher, Thomas Strønen, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios, München Cover: Fidel Sclavo Album produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: December 5, 2025
Off Stillness begins not with sound but with a memory, one that Thomas Strønen carries like a stone kept in the pocket of his youth, made rounder and smoother with time. His recollection of slipping unnoticed through a café kitchen in Tønsberg to witness his first jazz concert at age 15 is more than nostalgia; it’s an origin story. There, engulfed in the sounds of Jon Balke’s Oslo 13, was a revelation. Rhythm, he discovered, was not a grid but a worldview, a way for the body to converse with the unseen.
From this quiet prelude, the latest iteration of his band Time Is A Blind Guide opens with “Memories of Paul,” a piece that feels like stepping into the half-light of Rainbow Studio, a space that does not merely record music but seems to cultivate it. Despite the title, this is not a tribute to Motian or Bley so much as a meditation on the tension between lineage and selfhood. Ayumi Tanaka’s piano breathes first, the faint stirring of a creature waking in its natural habitat. Håkon Aase’s violin is a drifting breeze, Leo Svensson Sander’s cello a subterranean hum, and Ole Morten Vågan’s bass a slow-moving tide beneath the surface. Strønen’s drumming is the pulse of the room itself, a presence woven so delicately into the others that extracting any single thread seems almost sacrilegious.
As the album moves inward, the climate changes with “Season.” Here, the strings take on an arid beauty, as if we’ve been transported into a landscape shaped by centuries of shifting winds. The piece proceeds like an archaeological dig through sand and sovereignty, yet from this dryness small harmonies bloom, each a tiny flower of possibility pushing through historical sediment. The music astonishes by how much it conveys with so little, conjuring a vastness that feels earned rather than imposed.
The ensemble’s paradoxical strength, its ability to move loosely while bound by deep listening, emerges even more fully in “Fall.” The piece sways like a great creature with an internal compass that needs no magnetic north. Its journey nourishes itself, leaving behind traces—melodic footprints, rhythmic indentations—for the listener to follow. Time is not measured but wandered through.
The mood softens with “Tuesday,” a piece stripped to its essentials, left bare so its poetic speech can resonate. Whether the musicians play in unison or diverge into their own small eddies, they inhale and exhale as a single lung. It is tenderness as a means of clarity.
A shift occurs in “Cubism,” where architecture abounds. The piece balances on a precarious structure of boards and cylinders, a slow-motion circus act in which each rotation differs subtly from the last. Strønen provides the chemical uplift, one reaction setting off the next. Tanaka’s piano becomes an alkaline counterpoint to the more acidic strings, and together they settle into an equilibrium that feels strangely, beautifully neutral. The music is precise without being rigid, playful without losing its center.
Abstract shapes drift into form with “Dismissed,” which begins like an experiment suspended in midair. Its irregular surfaces soon accumulate heat, expanding into outbursts of collective energy. Metallic tensions shimmer and collapse, highs and lows collide, and the piece finally dissolves into a sonic steam rising from a cooling forge.
Then comes “In Awe of Stillness,” which glistens with a self-generated glow, moving as if guided by impulses as old as they are unnameable. Just when it feels ready to drift away, it recoils slightly, a moment of satoric self-recognition. This pause resets the ensemble for the next step in its nomadic journey. Even as the piece thickens into louder phrases and hints of groove, it never sacrifices atmosphere. Nothing is ornamental; everything breathes.
By the end, one realizes that Off Stillness is as much a pilgrimage as an artistic statement. Its stories do not unfold in straight lines but in spirals, circling back to that teenage boy in Tønsberg who planted a seed that has now grown into a tree in its own right. The music invites repeated listening not to decipher it but to inhabit it, each return revealing new details, like light shifting across the same landscape at different hours.
For all these reasons, it may well be—both in craft and in spirit—the ECM album of the year. There is truly nothing else like it.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 