Founded in 2015, the Philip Zoubek Trio has released fi ve albums to date. With Enigma, the most consistently developed studio album in the ensemble's evolution to date will appear at the end of October 2026.

Over the years, the trio has idiosyncratically and persistently expanded the classic line-up of piano, bass, and drums: with synthesizers, effects units, xylophone, and recorder. Enigma continues this path — and condenses it.

A central theme of Philip Zoubek's compositional work is the relationship between acoustic and electronic sound. Not as a mere combination of two worlds, but as a productive tension: interlocking, juxtaposition, mutual colouring and destabilisation. How can the acoustic piano sound be subtly detuned, roughened, destabilised by electronics? How can an electronic impulse strike acoustic structures and transform them from within?

Often Zoubek plays piano with his left hand while operating the synthesiser with his right. From this simultaneous interplay emerges a hybrid sound that shifts between temperaments — from brutal glissandi and percussive attacks to chamber-musically delicate, marimba-like textures to bell-like resonances and distorted riffs.

The same applies to the double bass: David Helm also commands an extensive arsenal of effects — distortion, ring modulator, octaver — with which he probes the sonic space in both directions: into the brutal as well as the fi ligree.

And Dominik Mahnig too thinks the drum kit beyond its rhythmic function: with a fi ne sense for sound and melody, for instance on the table xylophone, he opens up a chamber-musical dimension of the trio.

The title piece Enigma came about almost incidentally. While improvising with piano and synthesiser, Philip Zoubek discovered certain programmes in which acoustic and electronic sound combined in a way that would not let him go. From these sessions, recurring sonic types crystallised that today form the centre of

the piece: glissandi of the most diverse colouring, mutually detuned, almost naive melodies, percussive textures, loops, distorted riffs.

These elements run through the entire piece, which is divided into several parts — self-contained chapters of a larger narrative that are inextricably linked. At times, one section grows organically out of the previous one; at other times, the parts are interwoven in more formally complex ways — as contrast, as rupture, as a slow transition. It is precisely through this constant return to familiar sonic zones that the enigmatic quality of the piece emerges.

Enigma was recorded on 16 June 2025 at Loft in Cologne. The recording engineer was Stefan Deistler; mix and mastering were done by Jan Philipp.