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Matthias Müller – Posaune

Eve Risser – Piano

Christian Marien – Schlagzeug

This is a brand new project, a European collaboration, powerful and sensitive at the same time. Three outstanding improvisers from Germany and France are joining long-standing musical ties and starting a project of networked sound experiments and discursive form finding.

Matthias Müller and Eve Risser have regularly played together in Eve’s different big ensembles, e.g. the new RED DESERT ORCHESTRA. Christian Marien and Eve played first together at the Moers Festival in 2015 at the legendary Morning Sessions. And Christian and Matthias have a musical relationship that goes back more than 15 years in different constellations, especially in the duo SUPERIMPOSE and the trio THE ASTRONOMICAL UNIT with bassist Clayton Thomas from Australia.

CRANES‘ debut CD „Formation<Deviation“ was released beginning of 2021 on Relative Pitch Records.

Foto: Oli Potratz

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Achim Kaufmann – piano

Liz Kosack – synthesizer

Christian Marien – drums

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photo: Cristina Marx

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Matthias Müller – trombone

Clayton Thomas – bass

Christian Marien – drums

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The Astronomical Unit was formed in 2007, when Clayton Thomas moved from Australia to Berlin. At that point Matthias Müller and Christian Marien had already worked as a duo for several years. The duos density and Thomas‘ distinctive way of playing was the starting point from which the trio quickly developed an independant contemporary approach to improvised music: The Astronomical Unit perform music, that almost sounds composed. They channelize the free musical flow into formal and structural clearness. One can tell that they are conscious of the tradition of American freejazz and European improvisation, but The Astronomical Unit keep reinventing themselves and question musical agreements.

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Peter Van Huffel – Alto Saxophone, Clarinet, Compostions
Sophie Tassignon – Voice
Lina Allemano – Trumpet
Matthias Müller – Trombone
Alex Maksymiw – Guitar
Nathan Bontrager – Cello
Meinrad Kneer – Bass
Christian Marien – Drums

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photo: Cristina Marx

Uli Kempendorff (U.K. Quartet), Ronny Graupe (Hyperactive Kid, U.K. Quartet) and Christian Marien (Olaf Ton, RitscheZast&Marien, Miss Platnum) make up the rest of the band.
The music is made up of groove, humor, unconditional joy of playing, fun in improvisation and a whole lot of written music!

The rhythm of the compositions is based on the names of the band members, respectively their translation into the morse alphabet. The harmonies are mostly derived from FFT analyses of drum preparations. Other microtonal approaches also play a role, such as the split-chord-technique in which 12-tone rows or intervals (which in turn are again are derived from the musicans´ names) are split in half with the help of quartertones.

In the end, this could result in a song where the drummer’s cracked thai-gong is subjected to spectral analysis which is then inverted and slowed down by a factor of thirty, allowing the musicians to send their name in morse code 16 times.

Martin Klingeberg – el. trumpet, voice
Andreas Willers – el. guitar
Thomy Jordi – el. bass
Christian Marien – drums