What separates sound from silence? Doesn’t silence represent the totality of all sounds, just as white is the sum of all colors? Sounds do not arise from nothingness any more than they can disappear. They wait in the immensity of space and time to be heard. That may sound as trifling as it is esoteric, yet it is neither one nor the other. For sounds are an aggregate state of eternity. They can no more be invented than colors, directions or movements. hey follow the laws of vibration in nature, and are the product of a chain of energy transfers that has been taking place for eons.

So what exactly happens when you put music into the world, sound and rhythm, melodies and harmonies? The sound is not positioned in silence, but rather the exact opposite happens. An already existing progression of sound states, which we call music, is freed from the cloak of roaring silence that surrounds it, just as Michelangelo had to first reveal his David from a gigantic block of Carrara marble before he could make it accessible to the world in all its perfection. he beauty of music rises above the ruins of silence. Creation is nothing other than perfection being made apparent. But what do these considerations have to do with the music of trombonist Samuel Blaser, pianist Tilman Günther, bassist Peter Bockius and drummer Lucien Bovet that we hear on “Rêverie”? What distinguishes this collection of songs from millions of other albums that are now freely accessible to everyone via social platforms? This quartet of two Swiss and two Germans shows us the primal principle of genuine creation. Something is initiated that already exists without having revealed itself to our perception. It takes precisely these musicians to follow the law of making exactly this music audible, without deviance. Why else would trombonist Samuel Blaser sit down at the piano himself in the piece “Sarabande”? He submits to the urge of an inner need that we call free will.

All four musicians individually have what it takes to trigger revolutions and move mountains, but that’s not the point here. The selfless nature of playing together reveals perspectives and horizons that have never been seen or heard before. In this is what only seems to be a paradox. Because the question of what makes music “music” in the first place, arises again and again. How does a solo on the trombone or piano differ from the seemingly unbiased twittering of a bird, how does a symphony differ from a thunderstorm? Who would seriously claim that the bird in question does not also possess that creative sense of direction, the monopoly of which we humans would so gladly like to claim? Isn’t it in each case simply the desire to be noticed?

No, Blaser, Günther, Bockius and Bovet are not birds. However, giving in to the inescapability of their artistic genius, they succeed, like the feathered folk, to create a sanctuary into which one can enter with open ears and become one with the music itself. Their songs are original, their collective sound is unique, and yet they release something for the moment, which in turn expands into infinity, that seems to have always been there, but has not yet been manifested. Is it they who play the music on «Rêverie»? Or, conversely, does the music use them to change the aggregate state from the eternal to the momentary? It is about nothing else. In other words, do musicians find melodies, or do melodies look for the right configurations in which to free themselves once and for all from their cocoon of tens of thousands of years? The answer (and “Rêverie” makes this abundantly clear), lies solely in the music itself.

Wolf Kampmann,
September 2024