The Squid's Ear Magazine


Rose, Simon / Nicola Hein : Moon (Confront)

A 2020 Berlin recording uniting British baritone saxophonist Simon Rose and German guitarist/electronic musician Nicola L. Hein in a richly textural duo of sustained microtonal guitar, gravelly saxophone rumbles, layered drones, and shifting intensities, balancing intense and sometimes corrosive abstraction with earthy, lyrical interplay.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Simon Rose-baritone saxophone

Nicola L. Hein-guitar, electronics


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Label: Confront
Catalog ID: core 55
Squidco Product Code: 36464

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2025
Country: UK
Packaging: Cardboard sleeve, sealed
Recorded in Berlin, Germany, on September 2nd, 2020, by Adam Asnan.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"A seven-string microtonal guitar electrocuted in sustain confronts the gravelly and undulating rumbles of a baritone sax under tension. Music of drones oscillating in parallel, in windy tiling, sometimes crackling.

Simon Rose, a British wind musician based in Berlin, the metropolis where it plays, has created a secret universe of breaths ready to be part of new sonic adventures, rustling or corrosive. With guitarist Nicolas Hein, heard with Paul Lytton, Matthias Muche, Robert Dick, Nicolas Souchal and many others, they patiently decline all the options of friction, tension, disruptions, that the radical traffic of pedals, electronic effects and manipulations of strings and microphones allows in the face of the floating or biting intonations of the dreamy breath suspended above the abysses.

This linear approach of spreading out sound layers, vaporous or caustic oscillations or abrupt and machine fractures moves in an almost infinite elongation of inspiration, variations of intensity, instantaneous metamorphoses. We pass from opaque static to playful swirling, living layers of sound vibrations that differentiate, complement, aggregate, suspended in the interstellar void or crackling in urgency.

A fruitful collaboration in the research of unusual and corrosive sounds (guitar) and carnal and dreamlike breaths (baritone sax). Since his free beginnings with Mark Sanders, Steve Noble and Simon H. Fell, Simon Rose has evolved towards radicality, among others alongside prodigious wind players like Michel Doneda and Philippe Lemoine. With Nicolas Hein, he is part of the extreme sonic fascination while maintaining his earthy and lyrical dimension, creating a contrast of the best effect."-Vincent Martial, Orynx Improv and Sounds


Get additional information at Orynx Improv Sound

Artist Biographies

"Simon Rose is a musician, author and researcher from London, England based in Berlin, Germany. He performs on baritone and alto saxophones in numerous collaborations and as soloist. He also collaborates beyond music with dancers, visual artists, mixed media, built instruments, site specific performance and more. His research interest is in creative processes."

-Simon Rose Website (https://www.simonrose.org/)
8/25/2025

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

"Nicola L. Hein (Born 1988 in Düsseldorf) is a guitarist, composer and soundartist. As a guitarist he is mainly concerned about the search for new sounds on his instrument. He plays electric and acoustic guitar with or without preperations and tries to find new ways of playing the guitar within the context of Free Improvised Music and Jazz. He plays the guitar with his hands and plectrum but also with a lot of different objects: screws, rulers, iron wool, violin bow, abrasive paper, magnets and many other objects which are part of his musical vocabulary. The result is his very own world of sounds, which is using the rich potential of the guitar as a creator of sounds. The manual creation is a very important character of this sound world, which never gets distorted by the use of electronic effects. As a composer he finds different ways of integrating philosophical ideas into music and to play music as a form of philosophy. In order to actualize itself the compositional work is always aimed at the improvising musician as a dialectic partner of the composition. From the interplay of these partners an ästhetic emerges that is based on the spontanity of the performance and the setting of aesthetic action spaces alike. As a soundartist he is developing different ways to project the musical ontology of Improvised Music onto different aesthetic rooms. This is done by creating instruments, installations and other ways of using the guitar, which use the musical ontology of Improvised Music as the center of the sonic practise but generate a lot of different sense structures that differ from the usual practise of Improvised Music (for example by creating a scenic sense layer etc.). He also creates sound installations which involve the recipient as a part of the work. The works encourage the recipient to make a special aesthetic experience with different sounds. The aesthetic of these sounds is inspired by the aesthetics of Free Improvised Music.

He studied Jazzguitar, Soundart/Composition, Philosophy and German philology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn and the Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Projects with the support of: Initiative Musik, Staatsministerium für Kultur und Medien, Kunststiftung NRW, Deutscher Musikrat, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Kultursekretariat NRW, Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Landesmusikrat NRW, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatstheater Mainz, Staatstheater Hannover, ON Neue Musik Cologne, RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur, Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Kulturamt der Stadt Düsseldorf, Kulturamt der Stadt Essen, Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Köln Musik, Acht Brücken, RWE Stiftung für Energie & Gesellschaft, Second Floor e.V., Jazz Offensive Essen, ZKM Karlsruhe etc. He has worked with: Evan Parker, Phil Minton, John Russell, Paul Lytton, Frank Gratkwoski, Michael Vorfeld, Rudi Mahall, Tobias Delius, Liz Allbee, Christian Lillinger, Ute Wassermann, John Butcher, Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, Wilbert de Joode, Tristan Honsinger, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Michael Thieke, Sofia Jernberg, Audrey Chen, Peter Jacquemyn, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Robert Landfermann, Jon Rose, Sebastian Gramss, Tomomi Adachi, Alfred Zimmerlin, DJ Illvibe etc."

-Nicola L. Hein Website (https://nicolahein.com/blemishes/about/)
8/25/2025

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


Track Listing:



1. Lunar Phasing 9:12

2. Moon 10:37

3. Pull 3:24

4. Earth 5:09

5. Orbit 3:57

6. Gravity 3:52

7. Revolve 4:00

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
London & UK Improv & Related Scenes
Duo Recordings
Recordings by or featuring Reed & Wind Players
Guitarists, &c.
New in Improvised Music
Recent Releases and Best Sellers

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Confront.


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The Squid's Ear Magazine

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