Dirk Serries: Three Completely Different Duos

By Eyal Hareuveni

Schneider / Serries (Schneider Collaborations, 2024)

The duo album of Serries and German experimental, free-improv, avant-rock and noise drummer Jörg A. Schneider (known from the free jazz-drone-dub duo Roji with Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida, a frequent collaborator of Serries) was recorded at Schneider’s home base, the Loundry Room in Hückelhoven, Germany, in June 2023. This is the most radical and varied album of these three new duos. Series plays a distortion-heavy, mean electric guitar and pushes Schneider’s manic, primitive drumming to extreme terrains on the opening piece “Muscle Steam” but on the following “Enhance The Machine”, Serries suggests a much more reserved, twisted kind of ballad, accompanied by fragmented rhythmic patterns of Schneider. “Mechanical Collapse” threatens to drown in another manic, noisy freak-out and “Complex Particle System” experiments with a dark and noisy cinematic soundscape. The album ends with the sparsely melodic “Force Regeneration”, and already calls for continuous chapters of this stimulating duo.

Christian Vasseur & Dirk Serries - Floating Simularities (Creative Sources, 2024)

French guitarist Christian Vasseur describes his music as free of any form of dogma and exploring new sound universes with such exotic instruments as archlute, mohan veena, Weissenborn-Harpa and electric 10-string lap-steel guitar. Vasseur brings to this guitar duo an 11-string classical guitar, tuned in quartet-tone, while Serries plays on archtop guitar, often with a bow and objects. Floating Simularities was recorded live at the Kapel Oude Klooster in Brecht, Belgium, and Serries was responsible for the recording, mixing and mastering. The seven intimate and almost chamber duets explore tension-filled, resonant acoustic timbres. Sometimes these duets sketch surreal textures or suggest brief stories, and at other times flirt with delicate, oriental-sounding elements, as in the most enigmatic, beautiful gamelan-like “The Traveller Surprised By His Dream”, with Vasseur adding wordless chanting.

Dirk Serries & Trösta - Magnetar (Projekt, 2024)

Magnetar takes Serries to his formative ambient era, then working under VidnaObmana and Fear Falls Burning pseudonyms, in a second duo album with fellow Belgian alto sax and electronics player-sound engineer-producer Trösta (aka Nicolas Lefèvre), following Island on the Moon (Consouling Sounds, 2022). The album was recorded live between 2021 and 2023 at Serries’ favorite Sunny Side Studios in Brussels, operated by Lefèvre. This 102-minute album offers atmospheric and peaceful yet quite melancholic, free improvised dreamscapes and drones of Serries’ expansive, effects-laden guitar lines, resonating with great reverb the subtle melodic phrases of Trösta. A highly immersive listening experience that highlights the close and powerful magnetic fields Serries and Trösta share.