Album Reviews (Nowhere Street, The Wire)

Since our debut Altered Forms Trio album was released on 4th October 2024 and we finished our release tour in Pohrsdorf, Leipzig, Dresden, Weimar and Berlin, we were very happy to receive two reviews which spoke beautifully of our music.

You can stream or purchase the album from Boomslang Records here on Bandcamp.

The first review is courtesy of Berlin-based music critic and curator of the Frequency concert series / festival in Chicago, Peter Margasak:

“The music on the recording crackles with energy and elasticity, with the rhythm section bringing jagged propulsion to the splattery lines of Forbes. As you can hear below on the piece “Splinter Shot” the trio delivers an infectious bob-and-weave attack, with each musician simultaneously in alignment while also pushing against one another, generating a delicious tension. On some of the material, such as “Blue Greegs,”  the pianist summons the more introspective side of Cecil Taylor, eschewing his explosive fury in favor of the more ruminative searching contained in his playing, Forbes will lay out a phrase or line, letting it hang pregnant in the air before making his next move, elaborating on the gesture or darting off in another direction. The febrile, chunky support from Lucaciu and von Buttlar allows the pianist to carve out space or unleash a contrary thrust. There are moments when the trio come together in a more conventional fashion, but the excitement in the music is shaped by a wonderful  internal dissension.”

Read the complete review here at Peter’s blog, Nowhere Street.

The second review comes from Black-music and -poetry scholar David Grundy writing in The Wire magazine:

“Leaning towards the harmonic and rhythmic sensibilities of jazz, their music is largely freely improvised, their spiky, changeable soundscapes suggesting kinship with the Howard Riley trio of the early 1070s featuring Tony Oxley and Barry Guy.

“Pianist Gregor Forbes offers Cecil Taylor inflected phrasing (swiftly repeated figures in octave transposition, jackhammer tremolandi) while reining in the more obviously outré aspects traditionally associated with free jazz pianism (clusters, gnarly dissonances, ‘energy’ playing). Bassist Robert Lucaciu is an active bass player without being overly busy … while drummer Johannes von Buttlar is particularly acute on brushes, leaning into the ambiguity they offer between momentum and stasis. Some tracks cover a variety of moods, others are more like etudes in a single area. The opener “Voles” finds Forbes repeating an upward and downward scalar figure, each time with minute alterations, over Lucaciu’s creaks and plucks, like turning a microscope on what might have otherwise been just one part of a longer improvised solo.

Elsewhere, as on “Blue Greegs”, the album’s only track to include composed material, the pianist’s sombre lyrical alterations are given weight and resonance by judicious, but not excessive, use of the sustain pedal. If the album has a single modal characteristic, I’d call it a kind of introspective extroversion. Drummer von Buttlar keeps things moving, but moving as if hanging in the air, whether with skittering or whispering brushes or crisp cymbal rhythms, so that space hangs between notes and phrases - notably when the spectra of bass harmonics and the after-echo of sustain pedalled piano notes merging to hang in the air on “Undergrowth”, a lovely effect.

“Prism” features some of the densest music on the record, opening with what is effectively a drum solo over scrabbling bass and inside-piano pluck before a series of staggered chords leads into the hushed magic of a consonant close. A band to watch.”

Find the complete review in this month’s issue of The Wire magazine.