Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, Christoph Schiller

Grape Skin is the focused outcome of a trio session between Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, and Christoph Schiller in a Zurich space, 2011. Doneda’s soprano sax curves and stirs in threadlike whispers, multiphonics, and percussive pops; Kocher’s accordion sustains microtonal clusters, gentle drones, or sudden detours; Schiller turns his spinet into a source of prepared sonorities, glancing harmonics, and tactile staccato. The approach is neither meditative minimalism nor crowded abstraction - it's about negotiating silence, framing bursts of sound, and then letting the resultant field breathe and mutate.​

Both “first membrane” and “second membrane” are journeys in slow listening, their forms coalescing out of spare motifs and sudden updrafts of energy. The music’s drama hinges on internal scale - how instruments shimmer just barely in and out of synchrony, how tiniest choices can alter the trajectory of a phrase, or provoke sudden new directions for the group. Quiet, at times nearly inaudible, the sessions always remain unpredictable: unorthodox sounds arise from tap, hiss, waver, or overtone, merging individual pulse with ensemble intuition. This delicacy is heightened by the musicians’ blend of familiarity and concentration - a trio acutely attuned to the weight of each sound and the implications of listening.

In an interview, Kocher reflected on the session’s “edginess and unpredictability”: Grape Skinpares back each musician’s vocabulary so that space, silence, and friction become driving forces. What emerges is both beautiful and unsettled - a field in which shapes blur, boundaries are porous, and music feels haunted by its own disappearance. The album stands as an example of what can happen when three improvisers give up security for the pleasures and perils of honest, collective exploration.