Axel Dörner — trumpet, electronics
Jassem Hindi — diverted machines, amplified broken objects, contact microphones, magnetic tapes, no-fi field recordings, no-input mixing board, feedback

After meeting for the first time in Beirut during the Irtijal Festival 2006, Axel Dörner and Jassem Hindi had their first musical collaborationin Switzerland two years later in 2008. From that time on they have regularly performed as a duo on different occasions. The music of the duo is electroacoustic music with trumpet and electronics, both musicians using their musical equipment and systems in an unusual way, developing their own techniques of sound creation.They are interested in exploring different possibilities of combinations of all musical parameters in a new way, so that the shape of their music can, for example, lead into unstable electric fields, frozen soundcolumns, and unexpected cuts in a surprising order.

The recordings for their album „waterkil“ were made during a three week residency at EMS in Stockholm and during a live show at -able gallery in Berlin. Audible snapshots of a river course transform itself into liquid oil paint on a defibrated canvas of a landscape painting, the surface scratched by a rusty palette knife. From reductionistic hisses and crackles the range goes to distorted arabian family-life field recordings and confronts these elements with a noisy and voluminous climax of electronic drone layers. The miniatures are frequently interrupted by parts of silence, giving the whole piece a very dynamic structure.

The lavish three page gatefold cover is based on drawings by Matthias Reinhold. The outer side shows a panoramic pencil drawing of something that could be a river looming through an entanglement of spiny rank growth. Inside is a agglomerate of small particels, each one a kind of a representative of the miniatures audible on the crystal clear Vinyl. Like undecipherable magic characters or unknown species of insects dispersed on the cardboard and specifically invented by Matthias Reinhold for the record.

Another very good fine art record from the German Corvo Records label. Corvo may not flood the market with dozens of releases in the style of the all-conquering Editions Mego, but everything touched by the hands of Wendelin Büchler is always immaculately presented and a well-considered and curated item, so that the listener is guaranteed a condensed slice of high-octane art (both music and visuals) in the manner of a good slice of roast beef. In the case of waterkil (CORE 004), a record concocted by the duo of Axel Dörner and Jassem Hindi, said roast beef may at first appear so transparent and wispy such that you wonder how the chef ever managed to carve the meat so thinly, but just the same it’s packed with solid nutriments. Yes, it’s another “quiet” record, the product of a situation where one of the performers Axel Dörner has spent many years refining and reducing his trumpet playing method in pursuit of an ever-more minimalist goal. It seems to me like only yesterday I was being floored by the audacity of Durch Und Durch, a single 40-minute improvisation of breathy and abstracted trumpet tones he recorded with Tony Buck – but that was ten years ago.
On this record, which was recorded half at EMS at Stockholm and half in an art gallery in Berlin, we see Axel Dörner V2.0 at work – he’s now equipped his instrument with small microphones, a mixing desk, and a special interface designed according to his wishes and desires. With this very electro-acoustic mode of setup, he’s able to bring in feedback and live sampling of his own trumpet playing – which is to say nothing of his ultra-refined playing technique, which allows him to wring uncanny snake-like tones and hisses from the bell of his trumpet. With the exception of some recognisably trumpet-like parps I can remember hearing, his playing on waterkil is mostly about extremely abstracted and minimalist sound art; I can tell you’re already shocked by the rigour of his stern, unforgiving approach.
However Jassem Hindi leavens the equation somewhat, adding a requisite dose of who-knows-what to these recordings… I don’t say this lightly folks, as this Saudi-born fellow who studied at the Sorbonne has made a studied attempt on his own behalf to make sure he falls between the cracks of the pigeon-holes. He may have worked with samples of other music, he may have created installations in art galleries, and he may have worked with experimental dance troupes… all this is admitted… but he states, quite insistently, that he is not a musician, visual artist, or a dancer. On his performing table we may see contact mics, tapes, assorted broken objects, and machines that are being diverted for the purposes of sound art. He also carries non-artistic field recordings around in his pockets, by which we understand that they are not “aesthetic” field recordings inviting us to savour the joys of a waterfall or a night-scene in Africa, but are instead badly recorded and distorted views of incredibly banal domestic scenes, like families closing the kitchen door, or something.
This approach I like; it’s already starting to make Chris Watson and his imitators look like old-fashioned landscape painters. Hindi steers all of these diverse sound sources through the ever-present mixing desk, and when these gobbly nubbets of his are performed together with whatever Axel Dörner is doing, the results have made it onto these two sides of clear-pressed vinyl in an unedited suite of perplexing art music.

They’ve been working as a duo since 2008, even if they don’t have many published recordings to show for it. This may even end up as their definitive statement.

It’s suggested that we listen to waterkil as a series of “audible snapshots of a river course”; even a particular river, the Moldau, is proposed for such an exercise. We’re aided in this idea by the superb cover artworks, heavy pencil drawings by the artist Matthias Reinhold. The sleeve itself is triple-gatefold, beautifully printed on both sides of white card, has a die-cut hole in one panel, and given the size of the LP edition the sleeve has every right to be regarded as an art print. I like the interior side with its idiosyncratic little shapes placed judiciously on a white field (it comes close to illustrating the music we hear). But note how the front cover represents a river, possibly, lurking behind a thick growth of brambles and reeds. I like this river-course notion, but waterkil is a largely static piece of music; or to put it another way, its forward movement is very halting and constantly interrupted. No sooner has the river voyage started than Dörner and Hindi decide they’ve found a leak in the canoe, and we have to pause for ten minutes while they think what to do about it. Or they simply pause with no explanation given, and go and stand on the riverbank looking profound and lost. There are a few aural moments of real drama on the record, where the combination of sounds makes for highly effective listening, but for some reason the duo don’t care to sustain that mood, and abruptly break off into mysterious silence (a silence punctuated by odd hisses and creaks). However, we’ve got to admire the boldness of this statement, one which shows how Dörner is pushing his work away from the confines of the “improvised” and into a more thrilling zone of collaborative, electro-acoustic / experimental sound art. Hindi, meanwhile, continues to fall through the cracks. Received in 2012.
— Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector

Dörner and Hindi often treat the boundary between sound and silence as some sort of treacherous tightrope. Waterkil is sometimes no more than a wispy exhalation of air hissing lightly into one corner of the soundscape; sometimes no more than a speck of static scuttling around an empty room, or a shrill line of feedback shooting upwards in a solitary jet. The listener is beckoned into the quiet – encouraged to creep into the absence and perceive the sound close up, intimately observing the audio teeter and waver off balance, flickering out of existence and back in again. The tension is agonising and delightful. The duo push against each other and against themselves, straining to make a sound, and straining to make as little sound as possible. But this is only one aspect of Waterkil.
The record can be openly loud and abrasive too: wails of trumpet, brisk zips of tape player, reverb howls and boisterous overheard conversations jostle for space in a soundscape that relished its own emptiness mere seconds before, marking the points at which Dörner and Hindi relax into more fluid and open periods of collaboration. The duo explore their full velocity spectrum on the second side, in which molecules of interference ricocheting off of silence gather themselves into stormy balls of harsh noise and distortion, tumbling towards peaks of volume and intensity. This is then of course juxtaposed swiftly by a return to excruciating quiet – soft scrapes of metal, the gasps of trumpet breath – proving that both players are capable of tightening the reins as quickly as they slacken.
— Jack Chuter, ATTN:Magazine

Also, not a foot tapper, is a 12″ 45 rpm record from Corvo records, a limited pressing in clear vinyl of 300 copies. Corvo is out of Germany and the recording is of Axel Dorner, trumpet and electronics, Jassem Hindi, on, I’m reading, “diverted machines, amplified broken objects, contact microphones, magnetic tapes, no-fi field recordings, no-input mixing board, feedback. While it’s a 45, it’s as long as many LPs. Both pieces are 19 minutes. Side one is Caol, side two is Able. The CD market is drying up, and the LP market, while there is an LP market for jazz, new LPs seem to be, for lack of a better word, more of a gimmick. They’re usually very limited editions, and more often than not, post-bop, even post-free-bop recordings. I remember years ago I got a full-length LP of a steam radiator hissing. That’s what it was. I could made neither heads nor tails out of it, other than it was a steam radiator hissing. This recording is similar in that it’s a-rhythmic, it’s a-everything, it’s sound, it’s noise if you want. Listening to it, except for maybe blowing through a mouthpiece, and I’m not sure if that’s what I was hearing, I really couldn’t have told you Alex Dorner was ever playing trumpet, or what the instruments are. It was sound. This is a new area, though it’s not the first time sound or noise has been recorded.
I think you have to go into this with a different attitude. It’s sort of like if you’ve enjoyed Rembrandt or the impressionists, or even the modern, early modern artists, cubists and things, and you see a later painting by, I hate to pick on him, Jackson Pollack, or even Cy Twombly, who was by far not my favorite painter. But if you look at it, and you’re coming from that other direction, you might dismiss it and say “It’s just color, it’s just paint, it’s just pencil drawing.” To some extent it is, but on the other hand, many people are affected deeply by such things. Jackson Pollack happens to be one of my favorite painters. I can’t explain it. I remember going to the Tate Modern Museum in London and wandering around viewing the artwork. Some of it moved me, some of it didn’t, and then I walked into a hall, and all of a sudden came upon a Jackson Pollack, and the hair stood up on my arms, it’s just a thrilling experience. I’ve seen Pollack work that hasn’t done that to me, but this did it. I think you have to put yourself in a different frame of mind when you listen to this kind of ambient sound. It’s not really ambient even.
The first time I listened to this recording, I was very dismissive of it. Then I thought about it and I thought “You know, Corvo records has made 300 copies of this. I don’t know what the list price is but it’s not going to be easy to sell. I doubt anybody’s gonna really make very much money on it, so there must be something here, some message, some way of listening to this.” And I did what I’ve done often with artwork that immediately has sent me back, I came at it again with a different point of view, and I just sort of listened to it. I can’t say it made sense, but it is sound, and you make of it what you can. It’s interesting, and like much art it asks more questions than maybe it answers. As a painter myself, people viewing my work often say, you know, “I think it’s this,” or “I think it’s that,” and I really don’t say anything. Think of it what you want.
Corvo records has released this LP called Waterkil, it’s a 45, it’s Alex Dorner, and Jassem Hindi. That’s it for Papatamus. That’s about a third as long as what I usually carry on for. I’ll be glad to hear reactions. Enjoy art.
— Robert D. Rusch, Cadence Magazine

– Retratos de um rio –
O registo da Corvo Records mais alinhado com tendências definidas da música improvisada e experimental, e designadamente com o chamado reducionismo, é “Waterkil”, do alemão Axel Dorner e do francês de origem saudita Jassem Hindi. E como não podia deixar de ser, a execução musical aproxima-se do limiar do silêncio e há secções em que é silêncio – silêncio habitado, entenda-se, como se verifica pelos longínquos crepitares distinguíveis – o que se ouve. O curioso é que esse minimalismo extremo se conjuga com gigantescas erupções de som, confirmando que o “near silence” não é mais do que o outro pólo da estética noise. Dorner surge neste disco com o seu novo trompete Firebird, construído por Sukandar Katardinata com uma interface electroacústica que coloca em circuito microfones, processadores e misturadora. Se se trata de um produto da tecnologia musical de ponta, já os dispositivos de Hindi denotam um aproveitamento inventivo da baixa (baixíssima, em alguns casos) tecnologia. Em linha com as suas máquinas estropiadas e alteradas, não dissemelhantes das “cracked everyday electronics” de Andy Guhl, estão os anti-“field recordings” que projecta nas tramas, gravados em cassete e contendo gravações da vida doméstica quotidiana.
O duo propõe que se entenda este álbum como uma série de retratos do curso do rio Moldava, e de facto há nele uma notável fluidez, quase com qualidades aquáticas. Se bem que esse correr de águas seja múltiplas vezes abruptamente interrompido, inclusive quando algo de especialmente cativante está a ocorrer. É como se Axel e Jassem não quisessem que se forme uma narrativa ou uma dramatização, partindo de imediato para outro enquadramento. A procurada tensão Impede qualquer fruição contemplativa.
— Rui Edoardo Paes, Jazz.pt 3/2015

Not often am I seeing a 45rpm 12″ in the jazz/improv/avant direction, so credit where due to the Corvo folks for knowing when to squeeze that particular fruit in service of better sound. This is a very intricate, careful endeavor, two side-long pieces from trumpeter Dörner and everything-else guy Hindi. Recorded in Stockholm and Berlin, this is a meeting of minds not so much focused on what you’ve heard before, and any efforts Dörner spits forth on his horn are countered by a bunch of mics, objects, no-input electronics and field hustle by Hindi.
Dog ears may be required to consume some of this, but what you can hear – headphones strongly recommended to do so, by the way – are challenging, disparate sounds, flickering past your ear like gnats in the humid American summer. Interesting if not something you’d jam regularly.
Clear vinyl and an impressive three-panel foldout sleeve, 300 numbered copies.
— Doug Mosurock, Dusted Feature

Das nenn ich ‘gewagt’. Dörner mit Trompete & Electronics und Hindi mit Krimskrams, Kontaktmikrophonen, No Input Mixing Board, Feedback machen hier ‘Musik’ für gute Ohren. Das verlangt auf Vinyl 1000%ige Sorgfalt, damit nicht Beabsichtigtes von vinyltypischen Nebenwirkungen übertönt wird. Aber – Hut ab – es knistert und prickelt und rumpelt tatsächlich nur das, was man hören soll und was von Matthias Reinhold mit kongenialem Artwork visualisiert wurde.
Außen mit wilden Bleistiftwucherungen, die dahinter einen ‘Fluss’ oder eine ‘Straße’ und ansonsten einfach nur das Weiß mit Anthrazit überkrakeln. Auf der Innenseite hat er dagegen nur kleine phantastische Grafiken auf weitem ‘Feld’ verstreut. Diese phantastischen ‘Mikroben’ entsprechen der phantastischen Selbstverleugnung oder Verwandlung der Trompete und der Kontaktaufnahme von Hindi mit dem Beinahenichts. Ein strahlendes Haltetönchen oder das Stolpern über ein Sandkorn sind da schon Ereignisse. Aber selbst übereinander gestapelt würden sich diese Ereignisse leicht unter der Hörschwelle durchschieben lassen. Hindi ist palästinensisch-französischer Abstammung und pflegt Kontakte sowohl mit der libanesischen Al Maslakh-Szene wie auch diversen Pariser und Berliner Echtzeitmusikern. Arte Povera und Mikrobruitismus wären mögliche Schubladen für das, was er da mit Dörner macht. Aber wozu so plumpe Begriffe für so feine Finessen. Die B-Seite ist dann zuerst überraschend aktionsbetont, mit Pierrot-Trompete, Stimmen, einer Art Gitarrenrauschen. Aber schon fädelt Dörner die Trompete doch wieder durch ein Nadelöhr, und Hindi dressiert Flöhe dazu, ins Mikrophon zu husten. Dörner produziert Harsh-Noise-Gefauche, aber zusammengepresst zum Strich in der Landschaft.
Definitiv, diese Platte hat ein Loch, das ein Ameisenlöwe gegraben hat.
— Rigobert Dittmann, Bad Alchemy, 73

Je ne raterai pas de sitôt une occasion de découvrir les nouveautés du label berlinois Corvo records. Un label vinyle qui prend le temps. Quatre références au compteur en deux ans. Quand d’autres labels monopolisent l’espace avec une sortie tous les quinze jours. Quatre objets soignés, de la pochette (qui se retrouve ici en trois magnifiques volets) à la musique. Un propos rare et sincère. Que ce soit chez Ezramo, ou son quintet avec entre autres David Fenech. Je vous laisse trainer sur le site web de votre revue préférée pour en trouver trace de leurs chroniques.
Bien souvent, les clés de la maison sont laissées à des artistes au propos souvent mêlé à l’art plastique, parfois légèrement conceptuel. Deux artistes se rencontrent ici sur ces deux pièces (une par face et en 45 tours), à la recherche d’un maximalisme rafraichi. Bien longtemps que je n’avais pas écouté AXEL DÖRNER, le trompettiste berlinois, et jamais entendu le discret frenchie JASSEM HINDI, au dispositif électroacoustique. Le premier a joué avec les plus grands (O.Yoshihide, J.Butcher, P.Minton etc…), le second avec ses autres discrets camarades Olivier Di Placido ou Basile Ferriot. Deux faces relativement opposées. La première présente un mélange d’ultra minimalisme et d’improvisations au ralenti. Le silence joue déjà après une courte première partie de cette pièce intitulée “Caol”. Ça crépite, ça papillonne au bon sens du terme, ça carillonne parfois aussi. Une réelle performance au son continu pour AXEL sur cette partie qui pendant longtemps se mêle sans qu’on s’en aperçoive de suite, aux sons analogiques de JASSEM. Dans un tourbillon avorté au bon moment. Laissant place à des manipulations en temps réel à la limite du larsen, au plus proche du geste. La deuxième pièce, “Able”, sonne plus noise, tout en partant et en se ressourçant sur ce tapis du presque rien. A base donc de pistons asthmatiques et de fréquences et bandes analogiques. Qui n’est pas sans me rappeler, le Small Cruel Party balancé dans une benne à harsh noise qui lorgne du côté d’Arnaud Rivière.
Un doux radicalisme qui en fait vous l’aurez deviné, un excellent disque.
— Cyrille Lanoë, Revue & Corrigée