“Groovin’ on the risk of falling apart is our common playground, like surfing on an underwater tightrope through waves of frequencies, riding on broken rhythms.” — Simon Grab & David Meier
Porœs is the first album emerging from the new collaboration between electronic musician and no-input-mixing polymath Simon Grab and multifaceted drummer and composer David Meier, who is also part of the internationally sought-after avant minimal rock band Schnellertollermeier.
Grab and Meier’s cross-genre sound is raw and volatile, morphing between razor-sharp, rolling, crumbling, erratic and fierce states. It balances between Meier’s vibrant organic drumming and Grab’s pulsating bleeps and noises, growling bass lines and dubbed out feedbacks that he extracts from his custom-plugged no-input-mixing setup. Always on the edge of musical tipping points, Grab gradually pushes his circuits into overdrive, only to recalibrate right before everything breaks apart. In defiance, Meier offers an abundance of bold, incisive, stumbling and lighthearted, earthly rhythms and textures that intertwine seamlessly and offer a world of its own to explore.
Throughout Porœs neither instrument is taking the lead. The two musicians step into a constant dialogue where it seems as if the sound waves are plunged into a perpetual maelstrom, welded into unbreakable bodies and melted into magma-like currents.
Being fervently hazardous improvisers, Grab and Meier recorded this seven track album in several studio sessions, leading to a result that is confident and precise, but keeps the urgency of live improvisation. The constant sense of risk, of falling out of touch, combined with the intriguing thrill of witnessing an extended moment of equilibrium is what makes Simon Grab and David Meier’s Porœs so captivating.
Simon Grab understands the error as integral part of his method. In a matrix of electronic feedback circuits, he tames the raw noises to find a musical balance within the randomness. Existing systems are always dynamic and never stable. In order to thrive, any system relies on feedback to balance itself out and adapt to the environment. His no-input-mixing album “Posthuman Species” and EP “Extinction” were released on -OUS, as well as his collaboration “[No] Surrender” with drone guitar player Francesco Guidici.
David Meier has been active between minimal music, modern composition, improvisation, jazz and rock music for nearly two decades. His band Schnellertollermeier tours internationally regularly and has played numerous festivals and tours all over the world. He initiated and collaborates with several duos, trios and ensembles, notably his septet Hunter-Gatherer that acts as a vehicle for his rhythmically complex and melodically idiosyncratic compositions. He appears on about 40 recordings to date.
