Electronica and percussion. Handmade music with electronica offer amazing potential.

How do they fit together: delicate percussion play and electronically tuned flugelhorn, catchy melodies and excursions in furious soundscapes, earthy rhythms and digital sound figures? For the 10th anniversary, the band Thomas Siffling Trio proves on their fourth album Personal Relations, that the combination of handmade music with electronica offers an enormous potential that can be explored even in minimalist instrumentation and exhausted convincing.

The unusual instrumentation of trumpet / flugelhorn, double bass / electric bass, drums / percussions make the special appeal of the album. While Thomas Siffling sets up the tunes, the bass player Jens Loh and the drummer and percussionist Markus Faller create the rhythm foundation. All three musicians rely on the electronics as the styling component. Without any chord instruments such as piano, guitar or a second instrument, the band creates a dense sound atmosphere. It is not a lack of electronic effects that are not only used as a splash of color but in spite of well-structured rhythm work the compositions dominate.

Thomas Siffling one of the pioneers of the electronic-tinged jazz. Style factor is always the mixture selectively inserted loop and reverb effects, and drum and bass combined with his very lyrical sounding game on trumpet or flugelhorn, the guiding instrument for its warm tone even with excursions into anarchic Klangerruptionen not lose.

All compositions of the CD convincing in their design alone. Striking is the combination of ensemble playing and reasonable freedom for the musicians as well as the exchange of depth and lightness. Special contours, the held in uptempo Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah, the playful-lyrical composition Reflective, the rousing piece Bustling vibrant The Pulse, the powerful and triumphant Wutbürger Trash Sound on. The latter piece is its name, it increases but, driven by drums and percussions, after a respite in a furious finale before the melody disappears into spheres lifted at the end. And since it lacks any of the 12 songs in Groove, one might possibly consider the last two tracks on the album as superfluous, where they are remixed versions of The Pulse and hallelujah. The album cover then leaves only one conclusion: Get out of bed, onto the dance floor.

Jacques Ziegler