Is This Water (We Jazz)
DIVR
Released February 2, 2024
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kpBuLAik0oX2gileBqoRG_Z310VaZ71zI
Spotify:
About:
The Swiss trio divr debuts on We Jazz on 2 February with their new album “Is This Water”. divr is Philipp Eden on keys, Jonas Ruther on drums and Raphael Walser on bass, and they play largely acoustic improvisations which loop without ever quite repeating. The new album is mixed & post-produced by Dan Nicholls (of Y-OTIS).
“We play in multi-directional time. You could hear three different timings, but on the other hand it’s together. We land in the same place. It’s not done with maths, it’s more about entering a flow”, say the band members, based in Basel (Eden) and Zurich (Ruther, Walser), the city where they all met more than 15 years ago.
“It’s a free approach to playing time. We don’t refer to a straight metre. But play around it. We never repeat something exactly, it develops with every turn, there’s always a small difference.”
Their music is elegant in its intricacy while covering a wide dynamic range. Opener “As Of Now” begins with languid chords on the piano, bass and drums skimming over the surface offered by Eden. Later comes a rush of energy, the piano briefly switching into more jagged terrain before peeling back. From there the album journeys through different intensities, rising and falling in smooth arcs as if you’re hearing their conversation move from gentle pleasantries to more heated discussions.
“Is this Water” presents a band who’s heading into a direction of their own, crafting pieces out of improvising together and tapping into a natural brand of instant composition. Nicholls’ edits and post production give the music another layer, one drawing from field recordings and layered textural ideas. Together, the elements form a sound that feels personal, organic and forward-reaching at the same time.
Track Listing:
1. As Of Now 03:54
2. Upeksha 06:19
3. Supreme Sweetness 05:23
4. 42 03:03
5. VHS Tomorrow 01:45
6. Tea High 06:06
7. All I Need 05:51
8. Echo’s Answer 03:54
9. A Glass Is No Glass Is A Glass 03:30
Personnel:
Philipp Eden: piano
Raphael Walser: bass
Jonas Ruther: drums
Composed by divr except “All I Need” by Radiohead & “Echo’s Answer” by Broadcast, “Supreme Sweetness” based on a composition by Gus Arnheim, Charles N. Daniels, Harry Tobias.
Recorded February 2-5, 2022, at “The Zoo“, Bern, by Felix Wolf & Wolfgang Zwiauer
Mixing/Post-Production: Dan Nicholls
Mastering: Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Loop-O Mastering
Original artwork by Emma Souharce
Design by Matti Nives
Review:
Playing music involving looping always has a hypnotic quality, so rote that to say that you’ve heard something like this before is almost hilariously on the nose. To loop and do something so distinctly different with the format, like surfing over a whirlpool, is a marvel to behold. It’s absurd how good Swiss trio divr is at playing this music. “Upeksha” seems to wash over the ear, hiding the sucker punch of the trio’s construction. It’s a common trope for many of these songs: Even when playing what could be considered a more conventional composition, like “Supreme Sweetness,” Philipp Eden plays with an ear both to the future of the genre and to the past. Bassist Raphael Walser seems to always find the right times to keep that hypnotism going and when to break the trance for a different sort of spell.
“Tea High” is a steady build of brilliance, climbing forever to sweet release, seemingly collapsing at the summit it reaches at the end. The cover of Radiohead’s “All I Need” is the perfect deconstruction of the tune’s melody and time, seemingly leaving Eden to lay out its phrases hither and yon, Jonas Ruther’s boiling over on the drum kit by tune’s end feeling almost like what Dave King would do on an early The Bad Plus album. For an album of tunes that largely finds its pleasures in tacking along in one direction while finding different ways to go in the other, Is This Water is one of the most delightful sideways turns 2024 has to offer.
Anthony Dean-Harris (DownBeat)
