Bandcamp There is no guitar anywhere on this record. The weight comes from a bass clarinet and a violin, with bass and drums underneath, and once you know that the whole thing reorganises itself in your head.
Christian Müller plays the clarinet and sings, Jamasp Jhabvala the violin, Loïc Grobéty the bass, Maxime Hänsenberger the drums. This is their fourth album and the first with a human voice on it, built on texts by the Swiss writer Regina Dürig. The band describe what they do as the tension between composition and improvisation, which is the kind of sentence groups use when they want credit for both. Here it is at least accurate: the writing is credited to Müller, the arrangement to all four, and the credits date the recording to a live session at Rec. Studio in Geneva in January 2025, engineered by Serge Morattel.
The shape is the second thing worth knowing. Nine tracks, seven of which run between a minute and a quarter and six minutes. Then “The Pitch, the Plight, the Polymer” arrives at position eight and runs nineteen minutes, longer than the three longest other tracks combined. It is not the finale either. A seventy-four second piece follows it and closes the album.
That sequencing is a real decision and it mostly pays off. The short pieces work as pressure, and the long one has somewhere to go because of them. Measured, the opener is the widest thing here, with thirty-three decibels between its quietest and loudest moments inside two minutes, which is more range than most bands manage across a side. The two tightest tracks are the short, bright, aggressive ones, and they are tight on purpose. The nineteen minute piece runs at the most consistent level on the record, which is how you hold a room for that long without shouting.
Recommended, and the audience for it is narrower than the four stars suggest. This is a record that demands you sit with it, and the reward for doing so is real. The reservation is that several of the short pieces stop rather than end, and across a full listen they can read as offcuts from the long one rather than as counterweights to it. Go to “The Pitch, the Plight, the Polymer” first. If nineteen minutes of bass clarinet and violin doing the job of a guitar army sounds like an evening to you, the rest will follow.
The distance between the quiet and the loud passages swings harder here than on almost anything we measure. “Monitor and Limit” opens the record with thirty-three decibels of it inside two minutes, and “Development” is close behind, while “Facing the Fasces” and “Grind your Tusks” sit below five, deliberately flat and bright where the rest breathes.
The long piece behaves differently again. It carries the highest average level and the smallest gap between its peaks and that average, which reads as nineteen minutes held at a steady simmer. For a record with no guitars, the weight lands where a guitar record would put it, low and in the middle.
Standout tracks: The Pitch, the Plight, the Polymer, Monitor and Limit, Development
