Drei

Can't get enough of this guys music. Have 2 other CDs, they are all excellent, favourite listening while I paint.

Swod are Oliver Doerell and Stephan Wohrmann and they come from Berlin.Although Mr Wohrmann's piano sits at the heart of their new album 'Drei'.Mr Doerell's subtle use of other instruments and electronic interventionsprovides the glue which holds their distinctive music together. Thereare eleven tracks in the set. The pieces are tonally coherent, busy withrhythm and melodically complex, often with a gentle jazzy twang. It all hangstogether in a beautifully melancholic kind-of-way. Enigmatic but soothing.After a brief solo piano introduction, 'Eins', straight out of a late nightNew York lounge bar, we get down to the business proper. The skittering beatsof 'Sans Peau' seem almost to rise into the air above the rolling sands ofan African desert landscape, bubbling along to a strange ululating chorusof small furry creatures of uncertain species and origin! Beguilingly strange.'Insel' is a wonderfully poetic composition incorporating fragments of afemale spoken vocal part which, given my extremely limited grasp of the Germanlanguage, adds a mysterious third dimension to the subtly ambiguous atmosphere.The simple harmonic structure of 'Oktober' shimmers like silver moonlight ona mountain lake, gently fractured by random percussive intrusions and a barelyaudible rhythmic pattern bubbling away just below the surface of the still waters.'I Am Here', in contrast, is full of bristling life and breathless brio (the workof American composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass comes to mind in the use ofrepeated angular thematic motifs). A tour de force of restless imaginative power.'Largo' is a sublime piece of night music punctuated by nameless bird calls andfinal track 'Intro 2' brings this fine album to a magically evocative conclusionwith a veritable feast of rainbow-saturated arpeggios and jittery insect life.In its own gentle way 'Drei' ticks all the boxes for a satisfying sonic repast.Highly Recommended.

Somewhere between Debussy piano music and contempory sound scaping, the very unique sound of Swod; "Drei" in the continuity and yet different from the two first albums; highly recommanded...