Waterkil is a singular sound creation starring Axel Dörner on trumpet & Jassem Hindi on electronics. The recordings for this album were made during a three week residency at EMS in Stockholm and during a live show at Able gallery in Berlin.
After meeting for the first time in Beirut during the Irtijal Festival 2006, Axel Dörner and Jassem Hindi had their first musical collaboration in Switzerland two years later in 2008. From that time on they have regularly performed as a duo on different occasions. The duo performs electroacoustic music with trumpet and electronics, both musicians using their musical equipment and systems in an unusual way, developing their own techniques of sound creation. They are interested in exploring different possibilities of combinations of all musical parameters in a new way, so that the shape of their music can, for example, lead into unstable electric fields, frozen sound columns, and unexpected cuts in a surprising order. Both musicians try to push a sound texture or a series of sounds to their threshold and to drive those sound materials to where they show they're constraints, saturation, inner necessity and physical laws. These are shown to matter as much as parts of a musical gesture.
Audible snapshots of a river course, maybe a kind of freaked out Smetana's The Moldau River transform itself into liquid oil paint on a defibrated canvas of a landscape painting, the surface scratched by a rusty palette knife. From reductionistic hisses and crackles the range goes to distorted family-life field recordings and confronts these elements with a noisy and voluminous climax of electronic drone layers. The miniatures are frequently interrupted by parts of silence, giving the whole piece a very dynamic structure. Axel Dörner plays a so-called “firebird” trumpet which is extended with a mixing board, microphones and an interface constructed by Sukandar Katardinata. With this equipment he is generating electroacoustic music defined through his own extended-technique trumpet sounds, feedback and a special self-developed kind of live-sampling of his trumpet. Jassem Hindi uses lo-fi electroacoustic material: diverted machines, amplified small broken objects, metal and wood scraps, contact microphones, tapes, no-fi field recordings, no input mixing board, and feedback.
The lavish three page gatefold cover is based on drawings by Matthias Reinhold. The outer side shows a panoramic pencil drawing of something that could be a river looming through an entanglement of spiny rank growth. Inside is a agglomerate of small particles, each one a kind of a representative of the miniatures audible on the crystal clear Vinyl. Like undecipherable magic characters or unknown species of insects dispersed on the cardboard and specifically invented by Matthias Reinhold for the record.
Limited edition of 300 hand-numbered copies.
Axel Dörner (born 1964 in Köln) has developed one of the most unique voices in free improvisation. His first instrument was the piano, which he initially studied at the conservatory in Arnhem, the Netherlands and at the Musikhochschule in Köln. From 1991 he studied trumpet with Malte Burba. Using the trumpet as a generator of microscopical sounds, he is focusing on the sound of his breath. But not just in a minimalistic way but also in combination with custom made electronic interfaces and as a noise generator. But what distinguishes Dörner from a lot of radical minimalistic players is that instead of turning this “new way” into a religion, he integrated it into his arsenal and continued to perform with maximalist free jazz groups, performance artists and electronic musicians. More than 70 records with an incredible wide range of musicians and styles proves his immense creativity and open mindedness. Among his collaborators you can find
Alessandro Bosetti, Annette Krebs,
Alexander von Schlippenbach, Zeitkratzer, Margareth Kammerer,
Franz Hautzinger,
Sven-Åke Johansson,
John Butcher,
Phil Minton, Mats Gustafsson, Splitter Orchester,
Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra. Numerous radio, television and concert appearances were made with these groups. In 2002 Axel Dörner was awarded with the SWR Jazzpreis.
Jassem Hindi (born 1981 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) is working in the fields of sound, performance and installations / temporary objects. Using lo-fi electroacoustic material like diverted machines, amplified broken objects, tapes, no-fi field recordings, no input mixing board, feedback, sine waves, he is recording friends, intimate moments, public displays of violence, mass movements and opera. His research is primarily focused on the tension between a musical gesture and raw sound material, generated by nervousness and necessity, and using editing techniques such as cut ups, diversion, repetition. Mainly influenced by the works of Jason Lescalleet and
Graham Lambkin, he collaborates regularly with choreographers, performers and visual artists, both as a musician and as a maker in general. Concerning his visual work and performance work he has adapted his working method regarding sound, using raw material in order to create or point at social dynamics, such as public displays of intimacy or details of violence.
He has worked and works with various artists from USA, Europe, Lebanon, Iran, Japan, Norway. His most frequent music and dance collaborators are Keith Hennessy, Axel Dörner, Chris Cochrane, Jeremy Wade,
Magda Mayas, Olivier Di Placido, Basile Ferriot, Jakob Riis and Julie Rousse. He is recipient of numerous grants and residencies for his projects.
