Static

Zurich based drummer Arthur Hnatek presents his first trio record, ‘Static’. Joined by his equally fearless bandmates Fabien Iannone on bass and Francesco Geminiani on tenor sax, this is music created by a classic jazz line-up and steeped in improvisational facility, yet simultaneously utterly unlike anything in the standard jazz tradition.

Available as a high quality 6 panel digipak CD with a velvety soft-touch laminate finish, and a high quality 180 gram yellow vinyl, 12” LP – comes with download code containing the digital album in multiple formats.

Hnatek is one of a new breed of players who see their music as a continuum stretching between genres, always thinking in terms of links rather than boundaries, possibilities rather than limits. His time spent playing drums with similarly adventurous and unclassifiable artists Tigran Hamasyan and Shai Maestro opened his ears to the possibilities of rhythmic variation: his immersion in electronic music production and the motorik tradition of Jaki Liebzeit alerted him the possibilities of repetition.

The bulk of the album was written by Hnatek, paying close attention to the details and textures, and drawing a range of different sounds from the drum kit: ‘I like the idea that you can have very complicated rhythms, but played in a repetitive way that sounds natural, and where the binaries of ‘written’ and ‘improvised’ aren’t too clear’. Alongside the written tracks, the trio created a wealth of spontaneous improvised music in the studio, and Hnatek has hidden snippets of these soundscapes into parts of the album for the listener to discover.

This is a unique record, at once spacious and complex, full of light and shade, elusive but direct.