Sebastian Lexer
Muddy Ditch
Sebastian Lexer (piano+) and Steve Noble (drums and percussion) first played together in the winter of 2011 and what seemed like an unlikely, even oppositional, pairing quickly proved itself to be an extremely well-matched one. Noble\'s sharp vertical hits and Lexer's sustained horizontal textures echo, disrupt and enrich each other, producing music full of complex slants and intricate resonances. Sebastian Lexer : piano+. Steve Noble : drums and percussion. Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere at Ca…
The Fog
Recorded a couple of years ago at the INTERLACE concert series at Goldsmiths College in London, The Fog is a great showcae of Lexer's and Kasyansky's duo performances. Albeit a short piece, it doesn't lack in intensity nor inventiveness, in fact, it's a very rich and dynamic performance. Grundik's tape manipulations and electronics reveal a detailed attention to the placing and harmony of sounds,while also creating a tapestry of textures throughout, often foccused on the extremities of the frequ…
Tri-Borough Triptych
Hearing Evan Parker make music with Eddie Prévost, on the first of these three lengthy duets recorded in three different London boroughs, is like watching a pair of tai chi masters sparring. Parker’s tenor and Prévost’s bowed and struck percussion draw buoyancy from each other’s energy as they alternately push and yield. Together they move with feline lightness, agility and balance, even when the music’s mood is stormy and turbulent. The event was Freedom Of The City 2012; the venue, Ceci…
Luftwurzeln
Old and new. This new CD on Matchless by Sebastian Lexer and Christoph Schiller keeps bringing these opposite ends of a spectrum to mind. If Schiller has taken an old instrument, a spinet, and approached it in new ways, then so has Lexer, whose Piano+ digital enhancements of a standard grand piano are as exciting a new development to that instrument as I have seen in years. The music on Luftwurzeln then also spans across that same wide divide. Improvised music in London has been evolving …
Impossibility In Its Purest Form
Percussionist Eddie Prévost not only co-founded the British improvising collective AMM more than 45 years ago, he is its chief annotator and its sole consistent member. With these dual roles he has both explained the aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of an enterprise dedicated to constant self-examination and on-stage negotiation, and ensured the music’s immediacy through the agency of his exactingly tuned-in playing. But before he did any of that, he was a fine jazz drummer wit…
Lost Daylight
'The compositions on Lost Daylight' by John CAGE and the almost-forgotten American Fluxus composer Terry JENNINGS date from between 1958 and 1966. Yet in the hands of John Tilbury and Sebastian Lexer they sound astonishingly modern. JENNINGS' solo pieces couldn't be more conventional in using only pure keyboard notes, but they could hardly be more radical in the way in which the notes are reduced, isolated and surrounded with silences. As Michael Pisaro's sleevenotes say, 'It is music of simplic…
Dazwischen
Sebastian Lexer piano +. Recorded at the Electronic Music Studios, Goldsmiths, University of London on 16th November 2008. Max/MSP programming, recording and mastering by Sebastian Lexer. Notes by Eddie Prévost, Ian Stonehouse and John Tilbuy. Design by Myah Chun. I am impressed by the varying degrees of intentionality and the spatial deployment of sounds (isolated, remote, etc.) which enrich Lexer's music. Shades of Cardew and Wolff. For example, in an ensemble the piano sound can be effectivel…
Blasen
‘blasen’ is the first duo disc by two of the rising stars of London’s improv scene. Seymour Wright’s recent solo disc ‘Seymour Wright of Derby’ was rapturously received by critics and was described by Dan Warburton as “the best solo sax music I’ve heard for years”. And Sebastian Lexer – a pupil of and collaborator with John Tilbury – has developed his own software to extend the sound of the piano electronically in live performance. Both musicians emerged from Eddie Prevost’s improvisation worksh…