Listening to this music means encountering a quartet that, over the course of four years, has developed a shared language aimed not at recognizability but at presence. It emerges from being there: from four people in a room, from air, wood, metal, skins, vibrations, and attention. Perhaps that is the true subject of this album: listening. Not the passive listening of those seated in the audience, but the listening of the musicians themselves. A kind of listening so intense that the boundaries between reacting and initiating, leading and following, individual and collective begin to dissolve. Improvisation is often misunderstood. The word tends to evoke notions of spontaneity, freedom, perhaps even arbitrariness. Yet free improvisation often entails precisely the opposite: it demands discipline, patience, and extensive experience. “You don’t think about yourself,” says Heinz Geisser. “You are with the others.” (Sophie Emilie Beha)