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Phil Minton (London) voice
Axel Doerner (Berlin) trumpet
Thomas Lehn (Cologne) analogue synthesizer

CD:
TOOT 'one'
[SOFA 518]
http://www.sofamusic.no/releases/sofa518.html

In TOOT we find the singing legend Phil Minton and the almost a
generation younger Axel Doerner, trumpet, and Thomas Lehn, analogue
synthesizer - at present two of the most in demand German musicians in
the 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 Doerner, born 1964, began his musical career with the
piano study, before he turned 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. Based on his background of experience of many years
as an interpreting and improvising pianist, the 1958 born Thomas Lehn
works in the area of live electronic music using analogue synthesizers
from the late sixties, which allow direct access and extremely
spontaneous interacting. The 61-aged 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 to one of the
expression-strongest and most famous improvisors of the European scene.

When in the sixties with the Free Jazz the musical sound was expanded
among other things into the areas of sounds and 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 temporary, needle eye expressionistic
contrast settings, embedded in the environment of sensitive and fragiler
sound things of three musicians, whose individual creations of sound
merge into one another and thus hardly still as voice, trumpet or
synthesizer are to be constituted.

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 sounds 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....

[This text is based on text fragments by Johannes Frisch and Peter
Bastian (Karlsruhe/Germany)]

updated August 28, 2006