A two-year break due to Covid provided opportunity for the development of what is surely Sonar’s most ambitious work to date.

The three pieces that form the album ultimately reveal themselves to be movements in a single long-form composition, one that moves with intention through peaks and valleys of the timbral, temporal and textural variety, leaving the listener emotionally exhausted but spiritually satiated at journey’s end.

With each listen, new details emerge, all of them worth noting, as minimalist guitar motifs commingle with delicious restraint, polyrhythms lend an air of dramatic unfolding, and the bass makes statements of rhythmic and tonal stability at one moment, then skillfully disrupts the equilibrium with odd-time ostinati the next. The sum effect suggests what it might be like to watch a relay race being run inside a hall of mirrors, a feat of daring handled with offhand grace and unerring eloquence by the band members.

Atop it all sits iconoclastic guitarist David Torn, like the Buddha on a mountaintop, offering shards of audio poetry in a language you’ve never heard and yet are somehow familiar with.

Sonar summons a world of wonder here, and invites you inside for what demands to be an immersive experience. In that world, nothing is where you thought it would be. And yet, everything is in its right place.

Jeff Miers, Buffalo News


In early 2022, after a two year break mainly due to Corona, Sonar was brimming with revitalised energy and keen to record a new album, again with support from David Torn.

I volunteered to compose some new music and the members of Sonar generously accepted my offer. I knew from the start that I didn't want the album to just be a collection of individual pieces, but rather something like a symphony in several movements. At first, it looked there might be five movements, but, as time progressed and the members of Sonar got more involved in the creation of the pieces, three of them began to stand out and became the ones that give this album its title.

Another decision I made at an early stage was to ask David to give us some of his recent guitar loop pieces, so that I could sample bits and pieces and then use these samples as the starting points for the new compositions. David sent me two guitar loop improvisations called ‘Tall Tale (Transcribed from the Language of Dream’ and ‘Maybe the Moon blew a Fuse,’ which became the textural foundations for the 1st and 3rd movements.

The third initial idea was to invite my friend J. Peter Schwalm to contribute his glitchy and synthetic, but remarkably organic sounds to the movements, knowing that he would undoubtedly add an extra dimension to the mix.

All three movements are based on rhythmical concepts that Sonar has been developing over the past 11 years and that include polyrhythms, extensive use of odd metres (on this record, mainly in 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11), isorhythms and 'twofold coverings', a term that I borrowed from mathematics to describe the phenomenon when a pattern is 'covered' by the same pattern played in a higher register and a faster tempo (for example one octave higher and twice as fast). The illustration on the inside of the CD cover shows the rhythmical structure of the third movement, which is basically a 3-against-4-against-11 polyrhythm.

Sonar rehearsed and recorded the music of this album during the summer and early autumn months, while Peter added his sounds remotely from his studio in Frankfurt. I don't really know where the energy and confidence that fueled this adventurous new music came from, but it was undeniably there from the very beginning.

The last step in the recording of the album occurred when David flew in from New York in November 2022 and the whole team assembled at Powerplay studio near Zürich to cheer him on. Recording David's distortion- and feedback-heavy 'wall of sound' electric guitar with two cranked-up tube amps and 6 microphones in the large room of Studio A was certainly one of the highlights of my musical life and a fitting conclusion of a recording which had started with David's loops recorded in New York about one year earlier.

Stephan Thelen, Zürich

Reviews:

Manafonistas.de
www.manafonistas.de/2023/07/04/stephan-thelen-2023/

Expose.org
expose.org/index.php/articles/display/sonar-with-david-torn-and-j-peter-schwalm-three-movements-3.html

The Big Takeover
bigtakeover.com/recordings/sonar-with-david-torn-and-j-peter-schwalm-three-movements-7d