read
TOOT
Phil
Minton (London) • voice
Axel
Dörner (Berlin) • trumpet
Thomas Lehn (Vienna) • analogue synthesizer
'In
TOOT, founded in May 1998, we find the singing legend Phil Minton and
the almost one generation younger Axel Dörner, trumpet, and Thomas
Lehn, analogue synthesizer - at present two of the most in demand
German musicians in the field of contemporary improvised music.'
Electroacoustic music in the word by word sense, improvised
with a sense for the unequal timelyness of density and emptiness, performed
as dialectic of tension and release. Very largely, this micro micro music',
writes the Cologne music journalist Felix Klopotek about the music of
TOOT, a trio in which the spectacular British vocal artist Phil Minton
meets two musicians of the recent generation of the German improvied music
scene. Axel Dörner, born 1964, began his musical career with the
piano study, before he changed to the trumpet at the beginning of the
90's. Since he moved to Berlin in 1994, he is as one of the most in demand
trumpeter in Germany involved in an immense number of most different projects.
Rooted in his background of being an interpreting and improvising pianist
since many years, since the beginning 90ies Thomas Lehn works in the field
of live electronic music using analogue synthesizers from the late sixties,
which allow a direct access to the elements of the electronic sound synthesis
and an extremely spontaneous interacting. Phil Minton began his artistic
career first as trumpeter already in the middle of the 60's in the orchestra
of Mike Westbrook, however soon appeared as vocalist and one of the expression-strongest
and most famous improvisors of the European scene.
Since with the upcoming of Free Jazz in the sixties the
musical sound was been expanded among other things into the field noise,
the musicians thereby operated also a 'cult of the intensity'. This is
not to be found in its original pure form in TOOT, appears however break-through-transcended,
as a temporary, needle-eye-expressionistic contrast settings, embedded
in the environment of sensitive and fragile creations of sounds of three
musicians, whose individual creations of sound merge into one another
and thus hardly are to be perceived still as voice, trumpet or synthesizer.
Nearly inaudible music streams through the real time-composed
textures: air breaths out of a trumpet without forming a tone, and from
a mouth, which gives stridulatory, groaning, hissing, howling, bubbling
sounds of itself. Minton, the miracle of voice, can immitate each noise
of its colleagues, also those 20 Hz tones and other sound substances of
Lehns analogue synthesizer, whose electronic sounds are able to bridge
the contradiction between technology and nature.
Like coincidentally developing rhythms disappear fast
again in the nothing. The poetry of this music lies in its fragility....
CD Releases
one
released in 2005 on Norwegian label SOFA
www.sofamusic.no/album/toot
two
released in 2008 on British label another timbre
www.anothertimbre.com/toottwo.html
Further informations, biographies:
Phil Minton www.philminton.co.uk
Axel Dörner www.axeldoerner.org
Thomas Lehn www.thomaslehn.com