While some albums are recorded in a single take, or more usually over two or three intense days in the studio, the eight meticulously detailed pieces of ‘Barene’ took rather longer to complete. The album’s title is of course no accident, the Barene being a mosaic of inter-tidal silt islands in the Venetian Lagoon. Formed by accumulations of sediment, their outlines constantly shift with the tide, it’s a concept which Swiss musicians Samuel Leipold (guitar, FX) and Martin Perret (Drums, FX) immediately took to heart.
Part of a generation for whom genre boundaries are fluid and experimentation an imperative (both were born in 1988), Leipold and Perret’s discographies and bios reflect their wide musical interests. The guitarist’s remarkable solo album ‘Viscosity’ (QFTF, 2021) is a perfect case in point, drawing as much on composers Feldman and Takemitsu as drone-based ambient music and occasional jazz harmonies and forms. A graduate of the Institute for Jazz and Folk Music at the Hochsule in Lucerne, he studied under Christy Doran, Frank Möbus and Nils Wogram. Equally at home in a progressive jazz setting, his wonderful ‘Ostro’ (Hat Hut ezz-thetics, 2023) took a fresh look at the music of the Jimmy Giuffre 3. Perret, perhaps best known for his L’Anderer project, which amongst others has featured Marie Krüttli and Otis Sandsjö, is similarly open-minded. Studying to Masters level in Lucerne under Gerry Hemingway and Norbert Pfammatter, he now splits his time between Lausanne and Berlin and also composes for theatre and film.
Leipold explained the process behind this recording in a recent e-mail: “Over a period of about a year we recorded free improvisations on drums, guitar, and synths, rearranged them with digital techniques, supplemented them with additional ideas, and manipulated them with effects. We sent the audio files back and forth, and each of us removed or added a layer, hence the image of the ‘Barene’ landscape.” For much of the time the musician’s primary instruments are so transformed as to be unrecognisable, and in addition to the extensive post-production they experimented with contact mics, magnets, microtonal tuning, and Leipold also used a bottleneck to alter the pitch of the strings.
Each piece has its own distinct mood and characteristics, as Leipold further elaborates: “At the start, we met a few times in person just to record sounds, without any specific concept or direction, simply collecting materials and seeing what might emerge. Then it often took a few rounds of sending material back and forth until we found the one element that gave a piece its centre. Once that happened, the rest usually fell into place quite naturally.”
The opening Melodion sees atmospheric guitar offset by a long and mildly unsettling drone, and along with the title-track it’s one of the album’s most worked-on pieces. Perret’s drum kit is at its most prominent on Bottleneck, his bold sweeps across the kit cutting a path through a sea of dense ambient sound, while there’s no mistaking his calibre as an expressive percussionist on the richly detailed Magnets and the more rubato Train Of Thoughts. On the single Matsutake Leipold uses a technique borrowed from Christy Doran (“the slightly ‘blurry’ guitar tone comes from recording through a hydrophone placed in a glass of water sitting on the guitar”), and the piece is also accompanied by a striking video from award-wining experimental film-maker Christin Turner. The soft metallic gamelan sounds of the title-track are cocooned in a soft gaseous shroud, emitting a strangely radiant luminosity, and the somewhat more abstract Stationary occupies a similar sonic space. Drawing to a close with a beautifully spacious improvisation, the sublime Mosso, sees guitar and percussion emerging from the deep and engaging in a sublime series of conversational exchanges.
Leipold and Perret have created an immersive sound-world in which sonic textures, weights and densities combine in an almost natural equilibrium, and whether your tastes are rooted in the electro-acoustic improv of AMM or extend to the ambient jazz of Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, ‘Barene’ is not to be missed.
‘Barene’ is released on 7 November 2025
