Press Reviews / Orion
FreeJazzBlog
Im Wald - ORION
Stef, January 2017
One of my favorite albums of last year is short, only 35 minutes worth of music, but what kind of music! The liner notes guide us to music history, through concepts of beauty and form and boundaries. This Swiss quintet brings their vision of music, and it is a compelling one.
The band are Tobias Meier on alto, Matthias Spillmann on trumpet, Frantz Loriot on viola, Nicola Romano on cello and Raffaele Bossard on bass. Their approach to music is quiet, deliberate and organic, it flows out of the initial few sounds and spreads out with precision as each musician adds tones and withdraws, creating an eery tension that stays for the entire album, a tension that seems to be living from the paradoxof the minimal and the universal, the tiny and the grand, the single note and the total experience. Why is it dark? Because the sound is mysterious. It could be the soundtrack for space travel as much as it is for dark woods in a horror movie. You cannot grasp what's happening, no quite the opposite, the music grabs you and does not let go. It's easy to be hooked on this one.