اسم [ISM] Metaphor_Excerpt [Pat Thomas, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal] by antonin gerbal

Pat Thomas - piano
Joel Grip - double bass
Antonin Gerbal - drums

To follow up on their first album "Nature in its inscrutability strikes back" (Umlaut Records 2015), the unclassifiable European trio سم [ISM] will release two new recordings captured during a studio session in Tokyo on November 2018. The first part titled Metaphor will be released on CD in Japan and Europe for spring 2019 while the second installment - the LP Japanese Flower - will be released by the end of the year. This long and dense diptych exposes and propels a music populated by sound fictions that pulverise the listening habits of the jazz trio format. Sometimes polyphonic, meditative, pulsed and repetitive, abstract or falsely simple, this music carried by three high-flying improvisers is intended to be crude, direct, labyrinthine, always rooted in sound mattere, as consisting of abrupt breaks and renewed continuities. Like the floral compositions of the Ikebana artist Junichi Kakizaki (who oversaw the design of this diptych), this music is « like a flower » in the sense that « it enjoys a unique custom or system, or philosophy, ideology and artistic sense ». The four pieces engraved on these two albums each bear a name of flower - this music becoming a metaphor of the plant.