Avantgarde-Klassik-Jazz Release auf dem NOTWIST-Label "Alien Transistor"... „Jungle! How much magic lies in this word!“ (from Walt Disney’s Jungle Book) Really it’s a shame to give an album containing so much black magic such a mundane title. A title which is reminiscent of serious music – a category to which one certainly could allocate this project. For the first twenty seconds that is. And from time to time throughout the course of the record. In the end one must resign oneself to the fact that this project, in its entirety, defies any classification. For that would be like trying to describe intuition, telekinesis or necromancy empirically. But even a musically scientific analysis inclusive historical contextualisation would shed no light on this album. An exorcism would be no use either. For Oesterhelt and Enders have created a hybrid out of the spirit of the new Vienna school of composed music and a kind of sultry jungle jazz. Imagine the Alban Berg Quartet playing exotica with their faces painted black and their eyes rolling. The two guys from Weilheim have taken lazy voodoo-percussion played on maracas and calabash as the driving pulse of their music. Their suggestive energy runs through the sublime string arrangements and their wickedness is ever present in the dark saxophone licks. We hear feverish breathing and lurking energy in the first piece. A cacophony of chattering saxophones, atonal violin glissandos and stoic maraca shaking greets the listener in No. 2. There’s kalimba figures in No. 4 – a mere skeleton of a piece. Or a sad gypsy waltz in the form of No. 5. A waltz that seamlessly transcends into a kind of harmonically free fugue only to flow into a dramatic slow-mo rumba. It’s simply great how Oesterhelt and Enders lay tracks and draw the listener into their sound cosmos. With every beat they invite you to delve deeper into this wonderfully multi-facetted and compelling music. Although after a few minutes the listener has to ask themselves, how on earth he came to be there. Despite all the harmonic adventures and great stylistic diversity, Divertimento für Tenorsaxophon und kleines Ensemble retains its moderate, even lazy tempo. This music walks a fine line between sleepy lounge-music and neo-classical. And so it unfolds its narcotically bewitching effect. Line-up: Johannes Enders Tenor saxophone Gertrud Schilde Violin Markus Muench Violin Tobias Weber Viola Mathis Mayr Violoncello Jost H. Hecker Violoncello Juan S. Ruiz Double bass Zoro Babel Percussion Salewski Percussion, Kalimba Carl Oesterhelt Djembe, Rattling, Kalimba Siebdruck-Cover home- and handmade by RED CAN!
