Trio Heinz Herbert - Tomorrow Wonderland (Red Brick) [Experimental]

Far-out fusion from Zurich's Trio Heinz Herbert who are currently blurring all sorts of boundaries with a Detroitian pioneer zeal, fusing their jazz chops with machine sounds, deconstructing, reimagining, upending synth & traditional instrument purpose, tipping their hats to Squarepusher, Göttsching, Mora Catlett & more whilst doing their thing, disrupting sundry, staid musical continuums as they go.

Further Reading

“We are all attracted to equal rights for sound - the quiet, in harmonic, the zoom in the zoom out, field recording, 4/4, polyrhythms, in sync - out of sync, trying to give each of these ideas or concepts equal significance and using these as a starting point to create music that is structured in a non-traditional way” Trio Heinz Herbert

Tomorrow Wonderland is the 5th album by Swiss outfit Trio Heinz Herbert; a propulsive, unfolding and gaudy journey. Two years in the making and the culmination of over 12 years of communal living as they work and play together. This is a record that transports us to protean sonic landscapes, situating but stretched and slipping with the trio’s unique time-bending skills.

Whilst THH may have started life studying Jazz and electro-acoustic music with mentors like Earl Howard, Mary Halverson and Gerry Hemingway, placing Tomorrow Wonderland within those fields would be like describing Solaris as a sci-fi film - i.e woefully inadequate.

For Trio Heinz Herbert - like J Dilla in Hip-Hop, Juan Atkins in Techno and Jaki-Liebezeit in “Krautrock” are profound Ryhthmanalysts. They squeeze the rich history of electronic music through a sieve, to discover their own strange harmonies, elegant micro-timings, and saturated lush colours. They run this sonic mulch, in collaboration with their trusted producer Manuel Egger - through obsolete hardware sampling-synthesisers and the sophisticated use of guitar treatments; discarding well-worn forms to conjure new mental and aural geographies for the listener.

Trio Heinz Herbert’s music foregrounds images, feelings and sensations. These are specific to their own personal space-time universe and swing between the abstract and the concrete. At times it feels like THH are soundtracking a foraging hunt for highly-prized matsutake mushrooms in the remote human-disturbed forests of the Pacific Northwestern. Whilst other tracks invoke the seedy, magenta tinged tones of the German auteur filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The opposite of pulses and rhythms is complete freedom from any rules, melodies, structures or repetitions, in a way this became the dogma of “Free music” in the 60’s and 70’s. Trio Heinz Herbert act like a bridge between free-improvisation and the highly refined sculpting of sonic landscapes that has become the signature of today’s modern electronic music. In a recent 5hr Twitch Q+A Sean Booth from legendary Warp duo Autechre recently confessed that he spent a year listening to nothing but Art Bears records. Perhaps if Autechre were to manifest this influence and swapped their laptops for hardware synths, acoustic drums and electric guitar, they might be making records like Tomorrow Wonderland too.

Luke Fowler. 

Credits

Dominic Landolt: Guitar, Effects

Ramon Landolt: Synth, Samples, Piano

Mario Hänni: Drums, Effects

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