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Buy lossless digital version in our Bandcamp digital storeTracklist
01. Before the Fall 06:23
02. I Insist 04:29
03. Broken Circle 04:48
04. Stepladder Technique 06:20
05. Squared Circle 07:42
06. Still Stream 02:44
07. Stretched 08:39
08. The Moon is Tidy 04:51
09. An Old, Familiar Tune 04:24
10. Ritual Offering 10:34
Total time: 60:58
Video
Credits
All music by Luca Venitucci, Dario Miranda, Ermanno Baron
Recorded by Guy Sternberg at Emil Berliner Studio in Berlin on March 18 & 19, 2022
Mixed and mastered by Guy Sternberg at LowSwing Studios in Berlin in October & November 2022
Original cover photo by Jamie Croft
Graphics and layout by Davide Lorenzon
Produced by Dan Peter Sundland and Aut Records
Description
Norwegian bass player Dan Peter Sundland has gathered three of Berlin’s most prominent improvisers in his Home Stretch. The quartet combines chamber musical timbres and sensitivities with the immediacy and freedom of free jazz and improvised music through Sundland’s compositions sprinkled with more open sections.
Propelled forwards by Steve Heather’s sensitively messy beats and Dan Peter Sundland’s distinct, electroacoustic bass sound, piano guru Antonis Anissegos and saxophone giant Philipp Gropper perform a neck-breaking, swirling dance through deceptive 12-tone matrices, Morton Feldman-like clusters and layered tonalities. The band connects through combining innovative intuition, deep listening and timbral awareness in what was already in their premiere concert described in the press as “near-perfect communication”.
The compositions on “Before the Fall” are largely based on dogmatic tonal concepts. The title track, for instance, takes its bass line from a misremembered Benjamin Britten piece rhythmically and melodically stretched. It then had straight triads added to it, as well as the first melody; finally the second melody (first tenor entry) snakes its way through the whole structure. ”Stretched” is based on a 12-tone line heard in its entirety in the chords in the intro; this then gets manipulated and processed throughout the composition, with the main melody taking rhythmical cues from Olivier Messiaën’s mirroring concepts. ”The Moon is Tidy” is as far light on concept as this album gets, but even here, the ostinato-like piano motive is dogmatically persistent through the changing harmonies of this jazziest tune of the album.
“Before the Fall” was recorded over two days at the historic Emil Berliner Studios in Berlin. Located in the same building as the legendary Hansa Studios, EBS takes its name from the inventor of the gramophone, whose society “Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft” established the studio in 1900.
