Apr 16

Apr 16 KALI TRIO PRESENTS LOOM

Creative People, Culture, Interviews, Music

A Swiss post-genre band.

The record took three years to develop and only six days to record. The recordings took place in a small underground vault, air-tight and intimate, like the final result.

They are: Raphael Loher (piano), Urs Mülller (guitar) and Nicolas Stocker (drums). They function as a collective, with every member contributing equally to the writing and creative process. They are natives of a contemporary musical world in which prog, noise, new minimal, ambient and neo-classical chamber music are just dialects of a common language. They feel at home within the constraints of classical composition, simultaneously they are fluent in free / improvised musical contexts. They operate by following their musical intuition and drawing from a vast non-ideological understanding of music history.

What is absolutely mind blowing about these instrumentalists is how each of them is able to push their instrument beyond its preset sonic aesthetics..."-FameMagUK

https://roninrhythmrecords.bandcamp.com/album/loom

Tell us about the origins of the band guys.

Raphael: Nicolas and I met at music school, in Lucerne, at a program for Jazz musicians. We shared a similar interest in rhythm and sound, so forming a band felt like a natural thing to do. As we were looking for a third player – someone who was willing to commit to a working band – the timing with Urs was just perfect, because he was kind of fed up with all the pop sideman jobs that he was doing at the time.

Urs: As a band, we figure things out together and work as a collective. This idea of collectivity was important to us from the very start. The sound of our debut album reflected three distinct personalities with very particular tastes, it evolved into something more homogenous on our current album «LOOM». We were really working hard to find our flow and a sense of urgency, with this material.

Describing our style is always hard for us, because we draw our inspirations from so many different styles and influences. It’s minimal, it’s rhythm-based, and we love detail! Our music is based on a compositional approach, but at the same time, as instrumentalists, we developed a high interactivity with each other on a very microscopic level.

Greatest inspirations or influences?

Raphael: Apart from music, I draw a lot of inspiration from hiking, nature and yoga. Musically, we are definitely inspired by the likes of Beatrice Dillon and Kali Malone. Both of them release records which work with a single mood over the duration of the entire record. The sound of electronic music, in general, is a huge inspiration for us. We try to recreate that with our “acoustic” instruments.

Nicolas: In that regard, living in Berlin for a year, in 2018, had a huge impact on me. Before this excursion I was ignorant in regards to the whole clubbing scene and electronic music in general. This changed dramatically with my first night at Berghain – that’s, of course, a huge cliche, I know. But I found it super fascinating how music never seemed to stop evolving, yet it was continuous, and this went on for hours! I also realised that jazz and electronic music are much more similar than I had previously thought.
A lot of electronica artists ended up working together, like Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, and they used their modular systems to improvise. I’ve played gigs that were completely improvised, but on a club PA , and people were really dancing. The playing felt really free, so I think you can draw a lot of analogies to “improvised” music.

what is the band's creative process like?

Urs: Our creative process definitely evolved over time. In the beginning, especially Raphael, would bring composed pieces and then we tried to work them out as a band. While we were working on «LOOM», we got rid of almost all the written melodic parts. So, at the moment, the focus for us is on much smaller fragments – a mood, a rhythm or a sound – which we work off of. We use these themes to explore different settings, which eventually evolve into tracks or songs.

Raphael: We take as much time with any idea as it needs, until everyone in the band really likes it. This can be tiring, and it definitely leads to a lot of discussions, but through this process the initial idea becomes so much richer.

How has covid impacted you guys on the creative level and the industry in general?

Nicolas: Streaming and everything moving online, this has been really accelerated. What would have, perhaps, happened anyway, but in the next 5 years – now it just happened in the span of a single year. I think a lot of people will question the “old” model of touring. It’ll hopefully move more towards residencies and bands staying longer in one city. If bands spend a longer time in a city and have other activities outside of “just” playing a gig, these stays could lead to a better exchange with local musicians, artists and communities at large. This would eventually make the whole thing more sustainable, also on an artistic level.

Raphael: It gave us a lot of time to rehearse and really dig deep on «Loom». We were able to think about the recording process at a much earlier stage and had the time to ask ourselves how it should REALLY sound. For me, personally, I was checking out a lot more music than I have before, spending hours on bandcamp and discovering a lot of new artists.

Urs: It also gave everyone a lot more time to reconnect with their instrument, on a different level. A lot of musicians in my bubble used this time to also broaden their skill set with recording, video production etc.

Thanks for joining us today guys, anything else?

Raphael: I really miss playing and going to live concerts. For me, music has the most impact when it serves a social function. I hope that we can go back to a reality were it’s possible to experience music in a live context again. And I hope that because of this strange break the social status of live music will increase again, because I think this situation made a lot of people aware of how much they actually miss it, and how important it is! We definitely miss it very much!