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This album is one of those works where silences and pauses matter as much as the sounds. After all, silence in common language is more of a real suggestion or something symbolic. A "choice" with a strong significance on the communication level that gives silence the same dignity that words or gestures can have. When we talk about music, silence consists of pauses that technically need to be played exactly like the notes: said in this way, it may appear as something boring because, after all, it is boring to follow schemes, and perhaps this gives an important value to this album born from the long collaboration between two of the leading exponents of contemporary jazz from the old continent: clarinetist Markus Eichenberger and double bassist Daniel Studer.
Both born and residing in Zurich, but with that wandering spirit that is not lacking in any internationally renowned musician worth respecting, the two published last January for the hatOLOGY label an album entitled “Suspended,” which serves as a kind of official document regarding their collaboration. Outside of any pre-established scheme, the album consists of a real series of improvisations as intense as they are seemingly disorienting for what may appear as a lack of continuity due to the apparent absence of a rhythmic section. But the fact is that it is there, but you do not hear it, or perhaps to hear it, you need to fill in those “spaces” in your own mind and feelings, with a true process of assimilating the emotional contents diffused in the void by the individual notes and the proposed musical passages. A series of combinations apparently abstract but instead damned concrete and which should be perceived in the best way immersed in a state of total darkness and maximizing the sound experience.
Surely we do not have an easy-to-listen album here, and this does not mean so much asking the listeners for a qualitative leap as sustaining a truth (evident moreover) that derives from listening, perhaps also prolonged, of this type. On a strictly technical and compositional level, as well as on the communicative level, we can certainly speak of something experimental: the proposal of a language made solely of short and sequential sounds like the transmission of data with the Morse alphabet or the rules that govern the binary system. Fundamentals of philological constructions that constitute discipline and the basis for subsequent developments that in the musical and communicative field could open limitless new perspectives.
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