Matthias Muche BONECRUSHER

Matthias Muche BONECRUSHER: Densities – 12 trombones and percussion

(DE, JP, NL)

Under Muche’s direction, the group creates a wide range of unexpected sounds and approaches. In doing so, it eschews any specific references to military bands or the musical traditions of New Orleans funeral parades. According to the bandleader, the music ‘explores the trombone as a large collective instrument that mediates between breath, noise, microtonal harmonic fields, dense brass textures and shifting soundscapes’.

On their Jazzfest Berlin debut, the group will perform music from their breathtaking album Densities, released this year, and fill the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche with a resonant, physically palpable sound. ‘Muches Butter’ is a dense drone piece permeated by circular, ceaseless swirls. The episodic ‘Quarter’, by contrast, constantly generates new melodies in a seemingly endless blossoming and unfolding of various sinuous gestures and shifting harmonies. The sparse *Up+Down*, a composition by the Berlin-based trombonist and ensemble member Matthias Müller, is a feverish study of microtonal glissandi – clusters of notes subjected to subtle shifts.

Furthermore, Muche and Müller, together with the Chicago-based trombonist Jeb Bishop, have transformed Johannes Bauer’s classic multi-track tape piece *Brass / Breath / Brisk* into a multi-layered tapestry of complex interplay, dense chords and soloistic excursions.

Etienne Nillesen and Rie Watanabe lend this piece additional martial rhythms on percussion, whilst their extended playing techniques add even more resonance and texture to the clamour elsewhere.

Line-up

• Matthias Muche – trombone, composition, artistic director
• Matthias Müller – trombone, composition
• Adrian Prost – trombone
• Carlotta Armbruster – trombone
• Anke Lucks – trombone
• Maria Trautmann – trombone
• Matthias Schuller – trombone
• Maximilian Wehner – trombone
• Moritz Anthes – trombone
• Moritz Wesp – trombone
• Yoshiki Matsuura – trombone
• Etienne Nillesen – snare drum
• Rie Watanabe – Percussion

With the kind support of the Kunststiftung NRW and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia