The Squid's Ear Magazine


Thermal (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn): Ice In A Hot World (Unsounds)

The 20-year followup to their 2003 album on the Unsounds label titled Thermal, the trio of John Butcher on tenor & soprano saxophones, Andy Moor on guitar and Thomas Lehn on analogue synthesizer update listeners with their free and ea-improvising approach through five studio improvisations of incredible detail, technical & sonic mastery, and astute conversational skills.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



John Butcher-tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone

Andy Moor-guitar

Thomas Lehn-analogue synthesizer


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UPC: 198015417026

Label: Unsounds
Catalog ID: 78U
Squidco Product Code: 33179

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2023
Country: The Netherlands
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded at AJMI, in Avignon, France, on February 8th, 2020, by Bruno Levee.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"THERMAL (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn) formed in 2001, three musicians from different musical backgrounds, evolving along their personal routes to meet in free improvisations. For twenty years they've been taking their subtle and explosive music throughout Europe. Unsounds released their first album Thermal in 2003. In 2023 the trio of quiet giants comes back with Ice in a Hot World, a new album recorded live in Avignon. The Thermal powerhouse has become highly confident but spontaneity and intuition are at the core of their performance at all times."-Unsounds



"Taking the sonic possibilities of their respective instruments (electric guitar, tenor and soprano saxophones and EMS synthesizer) through surprising and playful avenues, this is an exquisite example of the meeting of three experienced improvisers, each bringing to this exchange the perspective of their mixed musical backrounds."-Thomas Lehn website



"John Butcher

John is well known as a saxophonist who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of time and place. His music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and unusual acoustics. Since the early 80s he has collaborated with hundreds of artists - including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prevost, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Fred Frith, Okkyung Lee, John Tilbury, Christian Marclay and Matthew Shipp. Additionally he values occasional encounters - from the WDR Sinfonieorchester and EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Keiji Haino, David Toop, Sophie Agnel and Joe McPhee. He has been a presence on Unsounds records from the inception of the label more than twenty years ago, starting with the re-release of his debut solo album 13 Friendly Numbers, with many albums to follow, including collaborations with Magda Mayas, Tony Buck, Burkhard Stangl and his duo with Andy Moor.

Andy Moor

Andy began his musical career in Edinburgh, Scotland playing guitar with the four piece band Dog Faced Hermans. He moved to the Netherlands to join the internationally acclaimed agit-prop post-punk group The Ex with whom he has remained a member for over thirty years. Since then Moor's work has evolved outside of the traditional band set-up into solo work, and many collaborations, with long standing collaborations with Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides, French sound poet Anne James Chaton and Lebanese saxophonist Christine Abdelnour, amongst others. Moor is also a has composer of soundtracks for films, lworking recently with Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi. His latest projects include the quartet Lean Left and The Heretics project with Anne James Chaton. The end of 2021 also saw Andy begin work as a live DJ and radio producer leading to work with Amsterdam based Echobox Radio with whom he broadcasts a monthly live show. Entitled Blueprints For A Blackout these are archived on Mixcloud.

Thomas Lehn

A pianist and performer of contemporary music since the early 1980s, Thomas became widely known for his performing and producing of live-electronic music from the EMS Synthi A, a modular instrument which allows for great spontaneity in the musical process. He was trained as a sound engineer and pianist at the music academies in Detmold and Cologne from 1979 to 1987. He has been active in both classical chamber music and jazz ensembles throughout the 1980s. Gradually his musical practice of interpretation and improvisation have expanded from classical to contemporary musics. Lehn has performed at major festivals around the world, also through the Goethe-Institutes network. Long term collaborations are ensembles like Konk Pack, Toot, Thermal, Mimeo, Speak Easy, 6ix or duos with Marcus Schmickler, Tiziana Bertoncini and Gerry Hemingway. More recent are trios with John Butcher the pianists John Tilbury and Matthew Shipp, respectively, the trio Defuse with Xavier Charles and Roger Turner, and the duo Companion Species with Jennifer Walshe. He is founding member of the ensemble]h[iatus, which dedicates itself since 2006 to contemporary improvisation and interpretation, and has premiered commissioned works by a.o. Vinko Globokar, Anthony Pateras, Jennifer Walshe and Jürg Frey. As a synthesizer interpreter - live and in studio - he has realised works by Éliane Radigue, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Bogusław Schaeffer and Zbigniew Karkowski. He was soloist in the world premiere of Peter Jakober's Dort with Klangforum Wien at Musikprotokoll festival and - with soloist partner John Butcher - of Christopher Fox's Topophony recorded for hatARTnow with the WDR Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov."-Unsounds


Artist Biographies

"John Butcher's work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics.Originally a physicist, he left academia in '82, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians - Derek Bailey, John Tilbury, John Stevens, The EX, Akio Suzuki, Gerry Hemingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, Okkyung Lee, John Edwards, Toshi Nakamura, Paul Lovens, Eddie Prevost, Mark Sanders, Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, Phil Minton, and Andy Moor - to name a few.

He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with the uniqueness of place. Resonant Spaces is a collection of site-specific performances collected during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.His first solo album, Thirteen Friendly Numbers, includes compositions for multitracked saxophones, whilst later solo CDs focus on live performance, composition, amplification and saxophone-controlled feedback.

HCMF has twice commissioned him to compose for his own large ensembles. Other commissions include for Elision (Australia), the Rova (USA) & Quasar (Canada) Saxophone Quartets, reconstructed Futurist Intonarumori (USA), "Tarab Cuts" (based on pre-WWII Arabic recordings, and shortlisted for the 2014 British Composer's Award) and "Good Liquor .." for the London Sinfonietta. In 2011 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists.

Recent groupings include The Apophonics with Robair and Edwards, Anemone with Peter Evans, Plume with Tony Buck & Magda Mayas and a trio with Okkyung Lee & Mark Sanders.Butcher values playing in occasional encounters - ranging from large groups such as Butch Morris' London Skyscraper and the EX Orkestra, to duo concerts with David Toop, Kevin Drumm, Claudia Binder, Paal Nilssen-Love, Thomas Lehn, Fred Frith, Keiji Haino, Ute Kangeisser, Matthew Shipp and Yuji Takahashi."

-John Butcher Website (http://www.johnbutcher.org.uk/Biog.html)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Andy Moor [aka Andy Ex] (born 1962) began his musical life in Edinburgh, Scotland playing guitar with Dog Faced Hermans, an eclectic group that mixed post-punk energy with traditional tunes and improvisations. In 1990 he moved to the Netherlands after an invitation to join Dutch band The Ex. In 1995 he began another group, Kletka Red with Tony Buck Joe Williamson and Leonid Soybelman, fusing traditional klezmer, Greek and Russian songs with their own styles of playing.

Moor's own background is rooted in the post-punk Britain of the 1980s, but in more recent years he has collaborated with many musicians from varied backgrounds and disciplines. Many of these collaborations are duos, with amongst others Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides with whom he performs a set of rebetika songs (urban Greek tunes from the 1920s and 1930s), French sound poet Anne James Chaton, ex bass player from Dog Faced Hermans Colin Mclean, who now works with electronic music and live sampling, Brooklyn-based DJ, producer and writer DJ /rupture, and Lebanese Paris-based saxophonist Christine Abdelnour.

Moor has also begun composing soundtracks for films, working former Dog Faced Hermans vocalist-turned filmmaker Marion Coutts, with Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi and US experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen. His latest projects include a quartet with Ken Vandermark, Terrie Ex and Paal Nilssen-Love called Lean Left, a trio with Berlin-based artists and musician Alva Noto and Anne James Chaton called Decade, and a trio project with Anne James Chaton and Thurston Moore called Heretics. In 2013 he began a duo project with John Butcher. Moor lives in Amsterdam at present and continues to be a full-time member of The Ex. He is a founding member of the music label Unsounds, in Amsterdam, with Yannis Kyriakides and Isabelle Vigier."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Moor_(The_Ex))
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Thomas Lehn was Born in Fröndenberg (Germany) in 1958. Since the early 1980s Thomas Lehn has been working as a author and performer of contemporary music. After studying recording engineering - piano with Prof. Wilfried Kassebaum - at the Music Academy of Detmold in Germany, studies at the Music Academy of Cologne with Peter Degenhardt and Prof. Klaus Oldemeyer (classical piano) and with Frank Wunsch and Francis Coppieters (jazz piano) completed his academical education. In the 80ies he took part on courses of Studio for pianistic interpretation held by Prof. Jürgen Uhde.

As an interpreting pianist he has been playing concerts since 1982 - performing both contemporary new music including numerous first performances and traditional composed music of the classical and romantical period. In 1989 he initiated the chamber ensemble Trio Dario and four years later the Mengano Quartett, performing compositions of the contemporary avant-garde, in particular numerous first performances of comissioned works. Developed parallel to his work as a pianist, since the early 1990s his major and widely reknown work has been performing and producing live-electronic music. Rooted in the experience of a wide spectrum of musical fields based on his background as an interpreting and improvising pianist in classical-, contemporary and jazz-music and having been involved in numerous other projects like music theatre, dance, multi-media, studio pre-/post-production etc., he has been developing an individual 'language' of electronic music.

The electronic equipment he uses consists of analogue synthesizers of the late 1960s, and since 1994 in particular the EMS Synthi A. Besides the substantial sound qualities of its analogue synthesis, the facilities of this modular instrument - for example to modify electronic sounds very directly as well as to combine and to control several parameters of the sound synthesis at the same time - allows him to spontaneously act in close contact with the various structural degrees of the musical process.

In 2000 his solo album Feldstärken had been released on German label Random Acoustics. Up today, his discography enclosures about 80 CD publications. Numerous appearances at major international festivals of contemporary musics and concerts tours in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungaria, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Scotland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA give evidence of his international profile and recognition.

He has been involved in projects promoted and/or supported by the Goethe-Institutes in Belgrade, Boston, Bratislava, Budapest, Chicago, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Lille, Lissabon, London, Manchester, Marseille, Milano, Montreal, Palermo, Rome, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw, Wellington and York. His musical activities enclosure long term and newer ensemble collaborations as well as involvements in numerous specific single projects. Long term collaborations are ensembles like KONK PACK, TOOT, THERMAL, FUTCH, MIMEO, SPEAK EASY, 6IX, VARIO-34, as well as the duo works with Marcus Schmickler, Tiziana Bertoncini, Gerry Hemingway, Paul Lovens, Frédéric Blondy Urs Leimgruber and John Butcher. More recently formed ensembles are the duos with Benoît Moreau and with the video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen, trio formations with John Butcher involving pianists John Tilbury and Matthew Shipp.

Further he is pianist and founding member of the ensemble]h[iatus, an ensemble for interpretation and improvisation of contemporary music, whichs members are all experienced interpreters and improvisers. The ensemble compiles concert programs integrating/alternating notated and real-time-created contemporary music. It has been first-performing commissioned works by Vinko Globokar, Peter Jakober, Jennifer Walshe, Anthony Pateras besides performing compositions of the contemporary repertoire. Besides performing his own electronic music, in the recent years Thomas Lehn became more active as a synthesizer interpreter of electronic compositions. The realisation of Boguslav Schaeffer's Electronic Symphony - live performed in 2010 and 2011 - has been documented on the CD PRES Scores on polish label Bolt/Monotype. In 2012 he world premierred OCCAM VI for synthesizer solo by Éliane Radigue at Berghain Berlin during festival Faithful! and - together with KlangForum Wien - dort for synthesizer and 15 piece ensemble by Austrian composer Peter Jakober at musikprotokoll Graz and at Konzerthaus Vienna."

-Thomas Lehn Website (http://www.thomaslehn.com/read/vita_e.html)
3/27/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Dreams Are Fraying (12:56)

2. Autumn Fireflies (17:34)

3. Echoes of a Clucking Tongue (15:12)

4. Back to Vapour (3:46)

5. Ice in a Hot World (6:06)

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
Jazz
Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
London & UK Improv & Related Scenes
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
John Butcher
Trio Recordings
Staff Picks & Recommended Items
New in Improvised Music

Search for other titles on the label:
Unsounds.


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