Phalanx at Loft

tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro

doors: 7.30 pm CEST
concert starts:
approx. 8.00 pm CEST

The martial band name is a little misleading: the quartet Phalanx does not sound like a closed front, but is an open system. The main coordinates are jazz and something avant-garde metal-like that can hardly be defined. Anything can happen within these coordinates, and when the band speaks of „25 ideas“ per composition, they are being modest.
The wealth of ideas and beauty of Phalanx’s music arise from poles that are still traditionally opposed to each other: Jazz on the one hand, rock and noise on the other. Or in terms of instruments: the piano on one side, an electric guitar distorted in many interesting ways on the other. Jazz rock, so to speak – but without everything that often makes classic jazz rock so gruesome. In other words, without any self-indulgent fiddling around and bad gimmickry....

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tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro

doors: 7.30 pm CEST
concert starts:
approx. 8.00 pm CEST

The martial band name is a little misleading: the quartet Phalanx does not sound like a closed front, but is an open system. The main coordinates are jazz and something avant-garde metal-like that can hardly be defined. Anything can happen within these coordinates, and when the band speaks of „25 ideas“ per composition, they are being modest.
The wealth of ideas and beauty of Phalanx’s music arise from poles that are still traditionally opposed to each other: Jazz on the one hand, rock and noise on the other. Or in terms of instruments: the piano on one side, an electric guitar distorted in many interesting ways on the other. Jazz rock, so to speak – but without everything that often makes classic jazz rock so gruesome. In other words, without any self-indulgent fiddling around and bad gimmickry.

Instead, the three musicians around bandleader Mathieu Bech play an amalgam of jazz and avant-rock. Pieces in which elegiac piano melodies can be replaced by a freewheeling guitar without there being a change of genre; in which neoclassical sounds are interrupted by noise and you think „Yes, that’s right“. Or, to quote a track title: „Now I realize it too“.

There is so much to discover on Wild, Phalanx’s debut album. A catchy piano line at the beginning and end of „Hansa 55“ brings everything to the point, but only briefly tapped, where others would build a whole piece out of such a melody. And in between, the instruments circle each other in a gentle improvisation. As in „Köln“, where the metal guitar screeches and the piano holds its own, asserting a crystal-clear tonality and setting the direction, while Axel Zajac fabricates splinters and flashes of sound. Or, as in the four-part „Mexico“, everything fragments into a small-scale jam, only to merge into a particularly beautiful passage at the end.

The connections made in the music of Phalanx are actually new in this form and only possible because four musicians from very different projects and traditions come together here. Mathieu Bech plays improvised music with the AusbruchDuo and – also with Johannes Pfingsten on drums – the Trio Flonks, but also folk rock with the Sem Seiffert Trio and reggae with Animo Sono. Bech is also a drummer, which also has an effect on the piano, which is often treated as a rhythm instrument here.
Axel Zajac plays guitar in the metal free jazz band Malstrom and has perfected the principle of noise infusion in this context. And drummer Johannes Pfingsten is involved in countless projects, including with the drum’n’bass duo Wallfacer.
All of this flows together in the sound of Phalanx and results in something new on the debut album „Wild“ that has never been heard before: jazz overflowing with melodies that has absorbed the intensity of rock and free improvisation.

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