Boris Baltschun | analog synthesizer, digital delay
Morten Joh | vibraphones, bass drum, tape delay
Jules Reidy | electric guitar
Koen Nutters | upright bass
Michael Thieke | clarinet
1. Endless ≠ Limitless 24:48
2. Neutral Star 24:45
Recorded live by Rabih Beaini at Morphine Raum on May 5 2022
Mixed by Rabih Beaini and Boris Baltschun
Mastered and cut by Andreas (LUPO) Lubich at Loop-O Mastering
Artwork by Monique Recknagel and Erik K Skodvin
Design by Erik K Skodvin
Composed, shaped and performed by The Pitch and Jules Reidy
Endless ≠ Limitless based on a piece by Jules Reidy and Morten Joh
about:
The Pitch is a quartet made up of Boris Baltschun, Koen Nutters, Michael Thieke and Morten Joh. Founded in Berlin in 2009, they play a hypnotic form of structured improvisation full of acoustic exploration and electronic intervention. On Neutral Star, The Pitch are joined by Australian guitarist/composer extraordinaire Julia Reidy for a record of star gazing electro-acoustic jazz.
Reidy’s playing and compositional technique between Takoma-style fingerpicking and Glenn Branca’esque microtonality, perfectly complements the loose improvisational framework The Pitch is providing. Endless ≠ Limitless, a recent piece by Reidy and Joh, is transformed from a washed-out/obscured tape delay composition into a colorful, meandering ensemble piece with a swarming character – blooming with intrigue for the patient ear.
The B-side strikes a more gentle tone: the 24-minute Neutral Star begins with a siren-like overtone whose drone-like flowing slowly morphs into a deterritorial modality with jazzy undertone. Accompanied by constant eruptions of vibraphone, clarinet, electronics and double bass punctuation – while permanently questioned by Reidy’s drippingly pearly steel guitar work. Slowly evolving into new territories through the expansive instrumentation and keen listening between the players.
The fact that Neutral Star was recorded in one take (by Rabih Beaini in his Morphine Raum studio/venue) in front of a live audience and without overdubs is hard to believe, even for the trained ear. The recording appears to be too multilayered for a single snapshot, with its compositional structures constantly shifting and moving against themselves, counterintuitively and anti-cyclically. Reidy´s playing has been described as „unstable harmonic territory, and the collaboration with The Pitch interprets this concept brilliantly – adding further non-places to the territory. And the listener, however, is never left alone in the process of tectonic shifts – at least as long as their listening is attentive and contemplative at once.
links:
Listen on Bandcamp: Neutral Star
Label: Miasmah
reviews:
Boomkat
The unsurpassable Jules Reidy returns alongside Berlin-based quartet The Pitch, who bless Reidy’s peculiar xenharmonic tones with sparse flourishes of vibraphone, clarinet, double bass and electronics. A dizzying display of obtuse harmony and doomy, cosmic jazz, it’s like Bohren & der Club of Gore playing Glenn Branca.
We’ve been knocked sideways by Reidy’s last run of releases, and ‚Neutral Star‘ only fuels our obsession. Recorded in front of an audience in one take by Rebih Beaini at his Morphine Raum studio-cum-venue, it’s a startling technical achievement, sounding deep and layered even without overdubs. The Pitch, made up of Boris Baltschun, Koen Nutters, Michael Thieke and Morten Joh, have been playing together since 2009, working out a way to blend acoustic improvisation with hypnotic electronics, and alongside Reidy they’re able to slip into a parallel universe. Their music is both familiar and strangely exotic, following Reidy’s obsession with non-standard tunings richly orchestrating the open-ended compositions.
‚Endless ≠ Limitless‘ began as a tape-delay-based piece written by Reidy and Joh, and here plumes into a smoky, decelerated cabaret puff, with haunted, jazzy double-bass plucks at the root and sparse, wooly vibraphone tones and waved woodwind blasts fogging the upper register. The piece unfurls over almost 25 minutes, sustaining its particular, Lynchian mood and giving Reidy enough space to add their characteristic twang where necessary. On the flip, the title track is more nebulous, with Reidy adding subtle fingertaps to a high-pitched clarinet fanfare that sounds as if it’s being carried across storm winds from beyond the coast. The lounge-y jazz vapors are all but gone here, swallowed by caliginous drones and wonky xenharmonic flurries – at times, it’s tough to work out which elements are electronic, and which are emanating from acoustic instruments.
Subtle and uncommonly atmospheric, ‚Neutral Star‘ is an album that takes the sultry evocative tone of film music and queers the pitch, neatly swerving any burned-out, melodramatic tropes in the process. Massive recommendation.
field notes (D)
Erik K. Skodvin is not only very active as a musician, but also as a label owner. His new, wonderfully reduced solo album »Nothing left but silence« for Sonic Pieces coincides with a new release on his own Miasmah. For »Neutral Star,« Julia Reidy teamed up with The Pitch, the Berlin-based ensemble founded in 2009 by Boris Baltschun, Koen Nutters, Michael Thieke and Morten Joh. The two pieces were recorded live in front of an audience at the Morphine Raum and are as dense as they are vivid: Sounds layer on top of each other, loosely arranged rhythmic elements interlock with one another. This is trance music.
The Wire
…On the transportive Neutral Star Jules Reidy dissolves into the collective sound of The Pitch, a Berlin quartet that embraced just around the same time. The opening piece Endless ≠ Limitless is based on a duo piece the guitarist made with Pitch vibraphonist Morten Joh, but both works resolve gorgeously radiating harmonies, with the stoic bass anchor of Koen Nutters completed by the sere lines of clarinettist Michael Thieke and the analogue synth and tape delays of Boris Baltschun, who delivers the most mobile, shifting textures of anybody involved here. Reidy doesn’t feel like a guest, but an equal member of the collective, sublimating their striking sound within The Pitch’s translucent sonic mélange.
Peter Margasak
freejazz.blog
“The idea . . . that one can understand the ratios of musical consonances without experiencing them with the senses is wrong. Nor can one know the theory of music without being versed in its practice.” (Giovanni Battista Benedetti-mathematician 1563)
… setting aside all the theoretical explanations (but if you like them: David B. Doty), this is what Just intonation is about: experiencing consonances and different ways to combine sounds and pitches that quite diverge from the mean-tone temperament combinations that represents the standard of western music.
Even though the discussions about the use of just intonation date back to the renaissance theorists, all in all just intonation is but a tool and, in more recent years, this tool has spread out from the inner circle of academic geeks to go as far as the Horse Lords (which are roughly classified as an experimental rock band) to add a new sensation to consolidate music practices. The evolution of Berlin lowercase improv or echtzeit music scene has offered fertile ground for the diffusion of such a practice and here is where we finally come to “The Pitch” and the record that is the object of this review.
To make a 14 years tale short, (but for those of you who are interested in going deep in the history of The Pitch, the 475 September issue of The Wire offers an exhaustive overview) the ensemble has started exploring just intonation since 2019 and this work is the most recent chapter.
Neutral Star is the result of the collaboration between The Pitch (Boris Baltschun, organ, Koen Nutters, upright bass, Morten Joh, vibraphone, percussions Morten Joh, Michael Thieke, clarinet) & Julia Reidy (adjustable fret guitar) and comes after various exchanges they have had starting from the 2019 concerts of The Pitch to celebrate their ten years and the record that Joh and Reidy released in 2022.
The first of the two pieces is a transformation of Joh and Reidy piece endless ≠ limitless included in Tape Shadow and the result is paradigmatic of the music in this album: a collective, unified process that moves around some shared reference points and slowly unfolds producing a sound that is all focused on making music together. Drones and sparse arpeggios go through a tonal sliding also favoured by the use of unstable cassettes to process and delay the sound. And this is the peculiar way The Pitch approaches just intonation adjusting the tones to play together.
The second piece Neutral Star in marked by a constant double bass punctuation that builds up the foundation for the various shifting layers produced by the other musicians and by the electronics.
The whole album “was recorded in one take (by Rabih Beaini in his Morphine Raum studio/venue) in front of a live audience and without overdubs” (from the album notes) and this again is consistent with the idea of music as collective process related to space and time/here and now.
In conclusion I have to say that I like what I have heard and hope you like it too… it certainly needs some dedication, but if you succeed in finding the here and now for this music, you will get a rewarding experience. Repeated listening is recommended.
Guido Montegrandi
Musique Machine
The Pitch and Julia Reidy – Neutral Star [Miasmah – 2023]
Australian-born Julia Reidy is not only an accomplished guitarist and composer, but the architect of elaborate and extraordinary acoustic soundscapes. Dispensing with standard song structure, Reidy favours episodic fragments of music that in their words embrace ‘unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative.’ Where earlier albums including 2019’s Real Life and 2020’s Vanish, centred on electronically-manipulated fingerpicking to create a wholly immersive sonic experience, their last recording, World In World, introduced more space into the music – the intensity dialled down substantially. It’s this musical transition that explains Reidy’s recent move towards a more experimental ambient aesthetic and her gravitation towards working with Berlin quartet, The Pitch.
Consisting of Boris Baltschun (organ), Koen Nutters (upright bass), Michael Thieke (clarinet) and Morten Joh (vibes) The Pitch have spent almost 15 years perfecting their ambient electronica, which can be aptly placed somewhere amongst the likes of Tim Hecker, Kali Malone or Death Prod. Theirs is not the branch of transcendent ambient kosmische set up for the listener to drift into interplanetary space, instead The Pitch create opaque and intense drone-centred atmospheres that are both dark in spirit and no less intriguing for it.
On Neutral Star, The Pitch and Julia Reidy have combined their respective talents across the album’s two tracks. This is ambient jazz in a vein similar to that of the Necks – riffing on musical figures that combine the playing of The Pitch with the fingerpicking virtuosity of Reidy. But while Neutral Star may be underscored by a jazz aesthetic, this music also moonlights as an exercise in deep listening with meditative drone permeating throughout.
Endless ≠ Limitless (Side A) was originally composed by Reidy and The Pitch’s vibraphonist, Morten Joh. The track begins with a clarinet and vibe hum accompanied by extremely subtle fingerpicking and deep bass. The instruments proceed to play abstract lines – the drone maintained in the background as the musical textures are consistently and sequentially overlaid. The dynamic builds gradually, the melody rising alongside sonic electronic effects until reaching its crescendo. Coming down the other side, the bass and clarinet urge on the drone, with the vibes and acoustic guitar playing out to the melancholic end.
Track two (Side B), is the eponymously titled ‘Neutral Star’ which is nominally less intense but no less impactful. The jazz core comes through more clearly here as some Reidy’s exquisite fingerpicking is gradually joined by their collaborators. ‘Neutral Star’ gains momentum, but the clarinet and bass are more subtle here – the instruments taking turns to come to the fore on a background of what appears to be synthetic ghostly voices, before again slowly fading to the gentle blow of the clarinet reed and the subtlest bass drum of distant thunder.
Neutral Star was recorded live and in one take at Rabih Beaini’s Morphine Raum studio, the ambient techno producer and DJ, which given the evident complexity on show is rather astounding. This is a piece that defies categorisation and is all the better for it.
Sarah Gregory
