The Chicago electroacoustic quartet of saxophonist, sine tone & harmonium player Boris Hauff, drummer/electronicist Steven Hess, and reedist Keefe Jackson, recording in the studio 3 freely improvised pieces that build in intensity as the album develops.
"The band came together in April 2010, for a concert as part of the Outer Ear series at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Boris Hauf, Steven Hess, Keefe Jackson, and Juun were working together during the annual new music festival Chicago Sound Map, and decided to put together a quartet to investigate their possibilities of collective improvisation. After some negotiation and post-production work by Hauf, the project was realized in its current form. Taking advantage of the varied backgrounds of the four and their shared interest in different areas of texture, rhythm, harmony, and long form, the music of this group promises to be a new direction for cross-Atlantic collaboration in improvised music."-Boris Hauf Music
"Nice to see Boris Hauf out and about again, on his first "real" album since 2006's Krom (hatOLOGY), the fourth (last? I sincerely hope not) disc with his EAI supergroup Efzeg. As you might expect, the music's moved on a bit since then: Proxemics started off as a recording of a concert at Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio in April last year - featuring Hauf on tenor and soprano sax with fellow hornblower Keefe Jackson (tenor sax and contrabass clarinet), Steven Hess on percussion and electronics and Judith Unterpertinger aka Juun on piano - which Hauf took back to Berlin, where he added sinewaves, field recordings and, intriguingly, harmonium. The result is odd - particularly that harmonium - but curiously engaging: this is music constantly in search of itself, often unable, maybe unwilling, to decide where it wants to go or what parameters it ought to explore. Improvisation, quoi. The added material, instead of forming a harmonic background for the live music to slip comfortably into (you could be forgiven for thinking that the "A" in EAI stands for "Ambient" at times) unsettles, disorients, recontextualises. Quiet though it is for the most part, this music imposes itself: things stick out, even at low volume, and often frustrate as much as they please. But I like my improv frustrating, as you know. If you do too, you'll like this."-Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic