Description
Download available on Bandcamp.
“Umlaut presents the second record by the Simon Rummel Ensemble. The previous record could be best described as nonsensical joyfulness, this one though – and this is completely different – is more of a joyful nonsense. When Simon assembled us for this new repertoire, he apologized for having lacked the time to write it down. Therefore, as he put it, he had whistled and then transcribed a 45 minutes long melody. So, there was sixteen pages of monody, eleven musicians and three days to make music. Very well.
After an initial thorough – hence arduous – reading, we were emboldened. Picture the scene : the violinist is trying to figure out wether he should play even notes rather than odd ones, while the synthesizer has chosen to spend a couple of minutes on that lab that’s laying around. The tuba – everyone’s behind him – skips a line , the alto sax goes clarinet without even bothering to make the necessary transposition, and the trumpet is making sure that, no, Dixies’ Dilemma’s theme is not appropriate in this affair.
Three days of disobedient, chaotic– in a good way – work, three days spent checking the relevance of impertinence, which lead us to this music, orchestrated, arranged and played live. One should listen to it as one would watch a reality show : after three days of living together, what group is forming, who’s dissociating from the others, who’s speaking louder , who didn’t take out the trash, and why are they still here whistling ?” – Joris Rühl
