Sound Journeys: Switzerland - selected by Nick Luscombe
Sound Journeys: Switzerland focuses on artists engaged in the Swiss experimental music scene. It has been compiled by producer, broadcaster and Nonclassical A&R Nick Luscombe following a visit to the country and research into the current activities of Swiss academic music.
“The aim of this compilation is to highlight the depth of creative approaches by experimental music artists and communities across Switzerland - from solo percussion and vocal based pieces, to ensemble compositions and electronics, ambient metal and data driven work. This is just the tip of a very substantial iceberg of incredible and innovative music being made throughout Switzerland today.” – Nick Luscombe
The first of a series of three digital EPs, preceding the Autumn release of Sound Journeys: Switzerland CD.
Volume 1 features the work of Julian Sartorius, JMO and D’incise & Cyril Bondi.
Check the first in a series of interviews with the artists featured on EP1 here.
Meet the artists
Julian Sartorius
Julian Sartorius is a drummer, percussionist and artist, who trained at the Jazz schools in Berne and Lucerne by instrumentalists including Fabian Kuratli, Pierre Favre and Norbert Pfammatter. Julian Sartorius has released numerous solo albums, creates audiovisual art works, collaborates with musicians, writers and artists and performs live in intimate venues and on festival stages. He creates projects like the 12-LP-box set «Beat Diary» (Everest Records, 2012), consisting of 365 beat tracks and an accompanying photo book; the daily 8-seconds loop series «Morphblog» (from 2013 to 2019); or «Depot», an audiovisual installation for 16 loudspeakers and 16 screens that was shown at Kunstmuseum Thun. For his last album «Hidden Tracks: Basel – Genève» (Everest Records, 2017), Julian hiked over 200 km with his drum sticks and recording equipment, playing and recording a multitude of sounds and textures on objects found on the journey. In recent years, Julian Sartorius has collaborated with numerous musicians including Sophie Hunger, Sylvie Courvoisier, Gyda Valtysdottir, Dimlite, Shahzad Ismaily and Dan Carey. His distinct percussion work is featured on the current albums of Kate Tempest, Matthew Herbert and James Zoo. Julian Sartorius has toured and performed live in North and South America, Asia and in Europe sharing the bill with artists like Marc Ribot, Deerhoof, Faust, Jaki Liebezeit and Arto Lindsay.
JMO
JMO, also known as Julie Semoroz is a singer, sound artist and head of artistic projects. Semoroz shapes sound using several sources such as field recordings, live microphones and her own voice with software and hardware. She offers sound pieces like inner journeys into the subconscious that penetrate into the darkness. Her work focuses on people’s individual relationship with mechanical and organic time. Her creations address new technologies and our post-industrial consumerist society. In her ecology-based research, in the sense of “habitat”, Julie Semoroz raises the question of how to experience our bodies and lives in society.
D’incise
Geneva’s Laurent PETER, also known as d'incise is a drifting musician, who grew up in between dub sound system and experimental electronic music. A sound explorer, he has no particular instrument, using whatever can be considered as such: softwares, recordings, objects, percussion, harmonium, etc. He's interested in radicalism, reductionism, repetitions and conceptual approaches, building specific set-up for each new occasion, in improvised or composed context. He tends to extract the most tiny details of the elements, appreciates slowness and obsessive explorations of simple processes. He's, since many years with Cyril Bondi, behind the INSUB. label & orchestra, the Diatribes duo, and many other things, and also does graphic design.
Cyril Bondi
Cyril Bondi has been a drummer and percussionist since 1994. A key figure of the Swiss music scene, he is a founding member of the band La Tène and of the duo Cyril Cyril. In the field of experimental music, he has worked with projects such as diatribes, Bondi Martel Schiller and many other collaborations. Bondi is also a composer, mainly in collaboration with d’incise, but also under his own name. He leads the Insub Meta Orchestra, a large experimental ensemble of 50 musicians, and is one of the coordinators of the label/collective INSUB. He played until 2018 with the jazz trio Plaistow.
Vincent Ruiz
Vincent Ruiz, born in 1990, is a Swiss musician and composer. Ruiz is known as a double bass player who has been active in the field of jazz, free improvisation, experimental music, and is a regular member of the Insub Meta Orchestra. He studied upright bass in 2015 at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel, and was awarded the Leenaards Cultural Grant the same year. In 2018, he completed a Master degree at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen.
Ruiz is more known for being the former double bass player of the minimalist/post-jazz group Plaistow. He has also performed and worked with a vast array of musicians and composers such as a.o, Nicole Hogstrand, Nicolas Masson, Jacob Sacks, Basel Rajoub, Emanuele Maniscalco, Cyril Bondi, Greta Eacott’s G-Bop Orchestra, Gamut Kollektiv, Ryota Miyake, Michael Pisaro, Magnus Granberg, Kresten Osgood.