By Eyal Hareuveni

The DDK Trio – Swiss pianist Jacques Demierre, German trumpeter Axel
Dörner and Swiss accordionist Jonas Okocher- was created in 2014 and
focuses on increasing the custom of “prompt composition” which matches
again to Lennie Tristano and passing by the legendary Jimmy Giuffre
trio, and performs improvised music completely centered on the right here and now.
The trio deploys an expressive palette of sounds starting from silence to
tiny sound strains and large acoustic eruptions whereas paying specific
consideration to the good precision of the articulation of musical
discourse. The trio invests an excessive take care of sound and deep listening
constitutes the core of the trio’s music which attracts from the sources of
at present’s modern music the place a number of sound universes intersect.

A Proper to Silence is DDK Trio’s third album and is a 3-disc field set,
recorded at Théâtre Le Colombier in Les Cabannes in France in June 2021
throughout a week-long recording residency at GMEA-Centre Nationwide de
Création Musicale d’Albi-Tarn. Demierre, Dörner and Kocher determined to
apply the precept of non-influence-in-each-other’s-choice that they
have been training for years as a trio. Every one made his personal album
from the identical uncooked recordings, individually, at his own residence or studio.
Researcher and sound artist Thibault Walter accompanies the field set with
liner notes highlighting the method carried out by the trio.

Demierre, Dörner and Kocher are usually not solely gifted improvisers but in addition
poetic and considerate sound artists with distinct and extremely imaginative
sonic imaginative and prescient and language, and Walter compares the DDK Trio work to an
aural diffraction community. Listening to this field set is like
experiencing “three cracks in Euclidean space-time” with the complicated
dances of three listening practices and their many interferences. In A
Proper to Silence, Demierre, Dörner and Kocher relate to silence
in another way. Demierre’s ten selections for the primary disc stress the
meditative, contemplative music of the trio, all highlighting the poetic
method the trio weaves the chamber minimalist music with otherworldly,
typically electronics-tinged sounds. Silence is a pure ingredient built-in
into these items. A few of Dörner’s eight selections for the second disc
repeat and overlap with Demierre’s however these ones give attention to the
experimental, sound-oriented strategy and the methodical dynamics of the
trio and the enigmatic, inside logic and rigidity of those quick items,
as one-of-a-kind “islands of music”. The silent segments are added at
the top of those items and set off transient moments of reflection.
Kocher’s eight selections for the third disc additionally repeat and overlap the
ones of Demierre and Dörner however now sound as if specializing in deep
listening, methodological however the intuitive means of
improvising-composing these items. Silence, once more, is an natural half
of the sonic vocabulary of the trio.

As Walter notes, Demierre, Dörner and Kocher weren’t on the identical locations
after they reproduced these items, and so they did so at totally different instances.
However there’s all the time a connection between their real-time selections throughout
the improvisations and the later selections for the field set. “These actions
intrude in and from out of the matter of the physique that connects them.
The truth is, wherever we glance, there are myriads of undulations that construct
and destroy the body-spaces remodeling them”, writes Walter. You possibly can
expertise repeatedly the austere and refined, labyrinthine dynamics of
the trio from distinctive views that enrich and problem one another,
and, clearly, the listeners.

Jacques Demierre (piano); Axel Dörner (trumpet); Jonas Kocher
(accordion).