MUSIC & BANDS
METEORS
LINEUP:
Jonas Engel – Saxophone
Leonhard Huhn – Saxophone
Philip Zoubek – Prepared Piano, Moog
Sebastian Gramss – Double bass / Composition
Christian Lorenzen – Keyboards, Moog, Synth
Dominik Mahnig – Drums, Percussion
+ Stephan Vester – Sound / Live FX +
“Not surprisingly, this adds up to impressive soundscapes of heavenly beauty across 17 tracks. Even after frequent repetition, the fascination of the first impression remains. An album that is only superficially easy to access and opens up unheard of worlds of sound for analytical connoisseurs.” (Sven Thielmann, Fono Forum)
“In general, the orchestral power, the tonal breadth and the rhythmic sophistication of this ensemble are astonishing from the first note.” (Lothar Trampert, Jazzthetik)
NEWS: New album by METEORS – Message To The Outer Space (rent a dog) Double Vinyl and CD released on May 26! Check it out on Bandcamp
upcoming concerts:
25.10. Frankfurt / Jazz Festival
29.10. Graz
01.11. Köln / Salon De Jazz
03.11. Köln / Salon De Jazz
Intergalactic broadband sound from Cologne – The album is a well-balanced status report from Earth – diverse in tone, music and with a disturbing lyrical message. An autonomous type of Deep Space Jazz -composed, arranged and realized by bandleader Sebastian Gramss, staged by six exceptional protagonists of the current Continental jazz scene – unique, explicit, unmatched.
The band plays almost weightlessly, passionately – a sentient organism with short torque and abstract elegance, demanding and appealing. Expressive, almost narrative, if like in the opener “We Spin Dizzily” as a collective accelerating wobble narrates the earth as derailed tumbling consciousness in orbit…
Perplexity that “Human Race” raises as the only spoken text on the album: backed by a subtle SciFi soundscape, the paradoxical text links the title names of the album to form a whole:
Our earthly habitat as a wonderful Class-A planet – full of chances and possibilities… and yet also with some annoying problems as “augmented clusterfuck“.
„No reasaon for concern, my alien friend. Come by … and see what we’ve done.“
Odd grooves, atonal spots, electronic shadows, theremin, parallel lines, polyrhythms today´s ingredients of States of Play, which were awarded the German Jazz Prize in 2022.
A chin-deep ballad like “Promised Land”, which draws its exhausted dark grace directly as if from the individual listener, is rare. Conceptual continuity becomes evident by a unison powerplay in “Our Bright Future”, or by hidden codes in the “Encrypted Messages” as Earth Status Report 2023.
METEORS – message to outer space is an artistic appeal in contemporary music that doesn’t need the appeal and yet transports it. Jazz in the keynote that doesn’t have to remain what it was or will become, surprisingly accessible, intergalactic, spooky and inspiring at the same time.
QuantumLeapJazz
