One of the best-kept secrets of the Belgian free jazz and improvisation scene; formed in the early 2000’s, when trumpeter Joachim Devillé and saxophonist Thomas Olbrechts were in their twenties, and drummer Dirk Wauters — their teacher at the art school in Brussels — in his fifties.

‘Too often we describe music using classifications; genres like ‘jazz’, ‘experimental’, ‘avantgarde’ are an easy shorthand to relay the rough parameters of the music to another person who may not have heard it. But these words are useful because they’re so vague, and they are most often used when the impression the music makes is equally vague. But when a group makes sounds that move the listener, these terms don’t hold up.
‘Dry Speed has released a record that is, at turns, futuristic and organic. It feels alien and
new, like plastic or titanium, but at the same time as if it is shrouded in the natural, growing
like moss or amplifying the sound of a great tree’s roots. Indium gives the listener multiple
entry points into the trio’s music: from a broad soundscape to a densely knitted series of
minute and exacting musical gestures’ (Nate Wooley).

‘Recorded in an old church in the village of Mauzun in the Puy-de-Dôme, L’invisible est multiforme is an invitation to let these abstract songs erase our obsessive thoughts of the day, to open ourselves to the vibrant poetry of the air and the evening, to finally forget ourselves. Each note played by these four intertwined hands is like a slight break in the fabric of time, sliding one over the other, reminding us of mortality and its beauty. Ritornellas flow out of mechanical clocks, fragile, taking care not to hurt the silence. Both seek to dig and open up new paths to enrich their duet, to open up imaginary landscapes. Sometimes the guitar cuts. through the fabric of an organ, fractures the song, just as the rain erases a landscape, redrawing it. But very quickly, both of them continue to follow this new path, improvising what will serve as a framework, a perspective, a language. There is a kind of praise for slowness in this ‘invisible’, a desire to hold back the song, not to let it slip away, to let the listener’s ear enter its course, to share the last note, its illumination. Each of these thirteen short sound pieces merge into a common colour, a vibration close to the different tonalities, which inter-penetrate, like a cubist painting. Words cannot take away the mystery of this record, words can only fail to describe the music, you must hear it’ (Michel Henritzi).
Beautifully presented, with numerous photographic inserts.

A new imprint from the wonderful Okraina label out of Brussels!
These will be double-10”, in gorgeously designed gatefold sleeves, with full-size, eight-page booklets of photographs.

To start, lovely, unusual duets on five-string banjo and steel pan (also slit drums and gamelan). Flowing and meditative; open-air; enjoyably less arsey about folk, soulfulness and melody than much Improvisation. (When Jaki Liebezeit renounced Free Jazz, he said it had too many rules.) For the label it evokes Laraaji and Bill Orcutt.
Check it out!

The basis of these works is a set of scintillating, widescreen improvisations by the Brussels-based pianist Pak Yan Lau (prepared piano, toy pianos, synth, objects and electronics) and Darin Gray (bass, preparations, objects and electronics), who has played alongside Jim O’Rourke for twenty years.
Over time Pak Yan added, layered, twisted, subtracted… including a recording of the underground tram in Albert, Brussels, for example. “I frequent this station all the time,” she says, ‘because my daughter goes to kindergarten there. One day there was an electricity problem, the whole station was humming, beautiful overtones coming out.”
“I liked the contrast between trudge (meaning you kind of move forward with difficulty and obstacles on your feet) and lightly (even in that situation doing it gracefully and lightly). The music on this record has that light/dark–ness.”
‘Mesmerising, fresh, inventive and intense,’ writes Stef Gijssels for The Free Jazz Collective.