GruppenTRAINING by TRAINING & guests

Like a scan through mind and body, this album begins. Emerging from a meditative state, one descends step by step into the sonic world of the following 30 minutes – into a terrain that could hardly be more fluid and colorful.
The duo TRAINING has melted five concerts from their 2023 series GruppenTRAINING into a hypnotic trip. Overlaps, collisions, and entanglements abound: rigid-seeming constructs are shattered by the primal scream of bassist Dan Peter Sundland and flow into Rieko Okuda’s trance-like piano playing. Pulsating, mutating grooves arise – born of bars, circles, and strokes, the glowing core of this collective creativity. The Korean gongs of Hyo Jin Shin and Bo-Sung Kim (Ensemble -Su) carry us from the body’s center to the ecstatic edges of consciousness.
Fourteen musicians of Berlin’s avant-garde gathered to shape these sonic excursions: Els Vandeweyer’s audiophile vibraphone expeditions, Gregoire Simon’s prepared spectral viola, Mike Majkowski’s shimmering endless resonances, Helena Weinstock’s fluttering and Oliver Roth’s tumbling flutes. Andreas Arend on the Lyra Polyversalis, a futuristic baroque instrument. Mascha Juno and Zola Mennenöh restore firm ground beneath our feet with unflinching calm.
In a meticulous, detail-obsessed process lasting a full year, Max Andrzejewski and Johannes Schleiermacher produced this album, which was mastered by Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich.
GruppenTRAINING is a musical melting pot, a color explosion, a surging, sizzling, bubbling, and glowing stream of sound and energy that forges ever-surprising paths.

Max Andrzejewski (*1986) is a composer / improviser / drummer living in Berlin.

maxandrzejewski.de