Catching up with Küchen

By Eyal Hareuveni

Swedish sax player Martin Küchen moves freely between free jazz projects, with his groups Angles 9, All Included and the Trespass Trio, to free-improvised, experimental projects where he explores new sounds and textures. His recent releases highlight his free and always searching spirit.

Trespass Trio - The Spirit of Pitesti (Clean Feed, 2017) ****½

This is is already the fourth album of this Swedish-Norwegian trio, featuring Küchen on baritone, alto and sopranino saxes, fellow Swedish veteran improviser, drummer-percussionist Raymond Strid, and Norwegian double bass player Per Zanussi. The Spirit of Pitesti was recorded in Oslo on November 2015 and tells the story of the Romanian city Pitesti, known for its notorious local prison that was used during the early fifties, at the time of the totalitarian communist regime, for re-education experiments of political prisoners In that brainwashing process of the prisoners, violence between the inmates was common and even encouraged by the Securitate secret police. The procedures got so out of hand that the communist authorities stopped everything after five years. The prison staff was pardoned, but 16 inmate collaborators were sentenced to death penalties.

“The experiment is not over”, Küchen writes in the liner notes. “A dry, hot and edgy wind that leaves you every time you feel it coming - and yet it comes again, with new promises, with new procedures how to tackle the now unspirited spirit”. Trespass Trio transform this sad story of Pitesti into a highly cinematic, emotional journey of resistance and defiance, charging the painful memories from that dark era with disarming compassion and tenderness. The interplay of the trio is telepathic, full of emphatic, gentle passion that brings to mind some of Charlie Haden's most spiritual, bluesy ballads. These melancholic, fragile ballads are delivered with a rare economic restraint for such a powerful free jazz unit, except for the playful, rhythmic “Fri Kokko (Free Retardo at the Koko Club)”. Only 36 minutes long, but every second radiates with profound beauty.

Küchen & Müntzing Scheibenhonig ‎– Rop På Hjälp (Inexhaustiable Editions, 2015) ***½

Küchen's Scheibenhonig duo finds the saxophonist working with former electric bass player Herman Müntzing. Today Müntzing is a teacher of improvisation at the Academy of Music in Malmö, and plays on many things. All these things are spread on the studio floor - kitchen gadgets, strings and sticks, old harmonium case, toy electronics, metal, various wood and plastic things, megaphone, toy synth, mandolin and “failtronics”, begging for Küchen and Müntzing attention. Küchen occasionally plays also on the sopranino sax and Müntzing plays also on the flexichord, a 12-stringed electric instrument made out of strings and pickups from 2 electric guitars, built especially for him by his brother, and contact mics. 

The duo was formed in 2010 and Rop På Hjälp is its debut recording, released in a limited-edition of 100 copies (plus a download option), with paintings by Tímea Ferth. It was recorded in Küchen's home town, Lund, during June 2014. The two pieces are free-improvised following Küchen and Müntzing associative train of thoughts. The first track is a busy one, gravitating around a mechanical, toy sounding pulse, ornamented by imaginative yet cacophonic rattle of weird sounds and noises that stress the duo great sense of invention, playfulness and clever drama building. The second, shorter piece suggests a sparse, naive texture that touches and goes a game-like rhythmic pattern, still, captivating with its amusing, sometimes bewildering sonic inventions.

Martin Küchen / Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga ‎– Bauchredner (Cathnor Recordings, 2015) ***½

Küchen's meeting with Greek, London-based Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, who plays the amplified, stringed zither, was recorded in a studio in Lund on September 2013, following two previous sessions, the first at Lazaridou-Chatzigoga's home in London and the second in a galley in Malmö, the night before the recording. Lazaridou-Chatzigoga is theoretical linguist and an experimental improviser who employs ebows and objects on her old German zither resonance box to produce sustained or granulated sounds. She has collaborated before with other sonic explorers such as trumpeters Nate Wooley, and Axel Dörner, clarinetist Xavier Charles, and violinist Angharad Davie. Küchen plays on this recording the alto and baritone saxes, muted most of the times, and radios.

Bauchredner refers to a 1923 painting by Swiss-German Paul Klee, Bauchredner und rufer im moor (Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor), that is used for the cover of this limited-edition release of 150 copies (plus a download option). One of the interpretations of Klee painting suggests that the little, imaginary creatures inside the ventriloquist may symbolize the odd noises and voices that seem to emanate from him. The atmosphere of this album is indeed focused on such odd noises and voices, delivered in an enigmatic, intimate atmosphere. Küchen and Lazaridou-Chatzigoga patiently weave layers of static noises, noisy breaths and whispers, raw feedback and resonant metallic sounds. Both distill these weird sounds into a meditative storms that suggest, in their turn, disturbing dream-like states, but full of psychedelic colors.