Sebastian Lexer

Sebastian Lexer rewires the ultimate nineteenth-century drawing room mechanism with twenty-first-century technology to create a music that hovers inbetween times, exploiting the tension between the automatic and the intentional, making any firm sense of space thrillingly uncertain. 

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Sebastian Lexer (piano+) and Steve Noble (drums and percussion) first played together in the winter of 2011 and what seemed like an unlikely, even oppositional, pairing quickly proved itself to be an extremely well-matched one. Noble's sharp vertical hits and Lexer's sustained horizontal textures echo, disrupt and enrich each other, producing music full of complex slants and intricate resonances. "They sync together immediately, entwining natural resonances of strings and cymbals, percussive attack of keys and drums, and the variegated textures of electronic processing and shuddering, abraded percussion. The two leave behind any notion of conversational give-and-take, instead diving in to the development of a constantly morphing collective voice." - Michael Rosenstein, Point of Departure "a dialect nourished by sequential superimposition and counteraction of alien, nigh impossible noises, they spawn incongruous yet mesmerizing musical patterns" - Antonio Poscic, The Free Jazz Collective "the descriptions 'drummer' and 'pianist' are barely adequate, only scratching the surface of what each of them does" - John Eyles, All About Jazz "It’s incredible what strange and beguiling music they make. As well as the tinks, plinks, taps and crashes that you might expect, here are planar whorls and laminal tones closer to electronic music than anything in orthodox pianism; and amid the stacked metal clatter, percussive emphases and taut skin and rim shots of Noble’s playing sit shimmering tones and plaintively vocal-like sounds, either scraped-up or bowed from sympathetically resonating materials. These sonics out-strange anything most percussionists ever dream of. And better yet, this is all done with as much restraint and sensitivity as animation." - Tim Owen, Dalston Sound --- Sebastian Lexer / piano+ Steve Noble / drums and percussion --- Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere at Cafe Oto, London on 25 October 2011 (1) and 18 June 2014. Mixed by Sebastian Lexer. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray’s Inn Road. Artwork/Design by James Vickery. Music by Sebastian Lexer and Steve Noble. Produced by Trevor Brent

Sebastian Lexer & Steve Noble – Muddy Ditch

"The richness of the music is quite extraordinary: it is sombre, elegiac, often exuberant, sometimes playful; there are occasional allusions to world musics as well as references to pointillism and Webern, there is delicacy and finesse, elegant phrasing, fragmentation, bell like sonorities of great beauty; there are flights of fancy and wild stretches of near anarchy." - John Tilbury'Camden' recorded during the Freedom of the City festival, Sharpe House, London on May 6th 2012'Deptford' recorded at a concert at Old Deptford Town Hall, Goldmiths' College, London on 25th May 2012'Dalston' recorded at a concert at Cafe Oto, London on 15th January, 2013 --- Recordings by Giovanni La Rovere (tracks 1, 2 & 3) and Rick Campion (track 1). All tracks mixed and mastered by Sebastian Lexer. Notes by John Tilbury.  Review in The Wire magazine, October 2013: "Hearing Evan Parker make music with Eddie Prévost, on the first of these three lengthy duets recorded in three different London boroughs, is like watching a pair of tai chi masters sparring. Parker’s tenor and Prévost’s bowed and struck percussion draw buoyancy from each other’s energy as they alternately push and yield. Together they move with feline lightness, agility and balance, even when the music’s mood is stormy and turbulent. The event was Freedom Of The City 2012; the venue, Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town, London. The character and dynamics of that occasion change continuously, but there’s never a sense that this exhilarating music is getting locked into a formal shape or falling under the shadow of its performers’ individual identities. Two other engrossing duets on TriBorough Triptych feature pianist Sebastian Lexer: with Prévost at Old Deptford Town Hall, South London, and with Parker on soprano at Dalston’s Cafe Oto. Lexer’s playing is disciplined and rather sparing, although he clearly enjoys pianistic practices and sonorities, not least perhaps for their historical weight, an element of resistance he can work with or against, just as Parker and Prévost parry the associations clinging to their own chosen instruments. But Lexer’s piano+ set-up involves a personally developed software to analyse and adjust the acoustic output, eliciting textures and durations unexpected from a grand piano, enhancing its scope and introducing an air of instability that calls for sharp reactions. Parker and Prévost are kept in states of heightened attentiveness, and the sustained outcome is lucid and graceful music making." - Julian Cowley  --- Tracklisting: 1. Camden (Parker/Prévost) 28:24 2. Deptford (Lexer/Prévost) 26:04 3. Dalston (Lexer/Parker) 24:55

Parker / Prévost / Lexer – Tri-Borough Triptych

Leveraging the concept of the geometrically impossible Penrose Triangle, the trio of Sebastian Lexer (piano), Eddie Prevost (percussion) and Seymour Wright (sax) perform three permutations of duos and one full trio. --- "On Impossibility In Its Purest Form, the trio of Prévost with prepared pianist Lexer and saxophonist Wright sound like they are working within the confines of the listener’s own cranium. Like craftsmen, they gently prepare and scrape at those bony surfaces, filling gaps, adding minimal embellishment. The more open-minded will find the restrictiveness paradoxically liberating, the trio ultimately carving out a door to a whole world of colour, shade and texture." - The Liminal "Each performance begin in nothingness, eventually finds a kind of convergence, then elongates that moment, stretching it in time and space until there is room in one’s awareness for little else. In a sense dauntingly abstract, the work is also visceral, with both Wright (he can sound like a duck without being specifically mimetic) and Prévost exploring harsh reed and bowed metal sounds, in contrast to the refined and unpredictable little sounds that Lexer seems to prefer. That harshness may articulate either the struggle of a music that is made out of nothingness and which will return to it, or the impossibility of the moment and the insistence on its potential for habitation." - Point of Departure --- Recorded at The Welsh Chapel, Southwark Bridge Road, London in July and October 2011.

Lexer / Prévost / Wright – Impossibility in its Purest Form

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