aurona arona |cs167

Ember is quartet of Urs Leimgruber (saxes), Christian Lillinger (drums, percussion), Oliver Schwerdt (piano) and Alexander Schubert (electronics, violin). Leimgruber is a veteran improvisor from Switzerland. The other three musicians all come from Germany and represent a younger generation. "Aurora Arona" is their second album. Their debut "Oullh d'baham" saw the light in 2006 on Euphorium. Every now and then the four musicians meet to play and record.
On "Aurora Arona" we find them in a three-hour session before a concert during the Ahornfelder Festival in Leipzig in 2008. Recordings were edited by Alexander Schubert, resulting in an album that is a mixture of live and studio-work. The guiding idea behind this procedure was to "produce an album that would not fall into the often seen structures of improvised concerts with the long bows of searching for material but rather to have distinct and clearly separated pieces with precisely structured parts." This kind of information often puzzles me. Can I detect what is live and improvised, and what are manipulations afterwards. At the end I often skip this question as irrelevant, and consider the music on the CD simply for what it is, in whatever way it came into being. The music on "Aurora Arona" has aspects of free improvised music, noisy soundcollages and electro-acoustic treatments. The atmosphere of free improvised music is the most dominant, guaranteeing the lively and
communicative nature of this music. It really boils from time to time, like in the cacaphonic parts of the opening track "Aruna Aurora" and "Begen bginn filt". The closing piece "Etherlorbien" moves towards the other side of the spectrum, and is a lenghty meditative soundimprovisation. An engaging but no sensational work. Dolf Mulder (Vital Weekly)

Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber has a watchmaker's sense of time. His works create the sense of listening to a watch's inner workings up close, with his collaborators coming in on cue with the surety of little weights and wheels. Four new releases—two quartets, a trio and a solo—offer an opportunity to catch the master, born in 1952, at a point where he is at the top of his game but still evolving, rife with fresh ideas. [...]

On Aurona Arona, the quartet Ember brings Leimgruber together with electronics and organ and piano and violin, as well as drums (Alexander Schubert, Oliver Shwerdt and Christian Lillinger, respectively). Things get almost wacky here, with the Monk-ian syncopation exaggerated on the exotic instrumentation. As always with Leimgruber, however, this is never for the sake of novelty. Crosscurrents and undercurrents abound, leaving assorted artifacts of sound in their circulation.

Leimgruber thinks through music, as most improvisers do, but there is a philosophical dimension at work, wherein he reflects on the value of time—which implies not least of all the time spent listening to music. Music of Leimgruber's rigor shows us how, rather than waste it, time grows out of this listening. Gordon Marshall (All About Jazz)