There is music that makes everything familiar because it simply varies what you already know. Then you feel good, just because you are not challenged by anything unfamiliar, any new ideas. There is nothing to hear that feels new and alien, and sometimes you dose off, comfortable – even completely satisfied.

Then there is music that blasts everything asunder. MALSTROM belongs to this second category – and explodes everything out of restrictive pigeonholes. For almost ten years, the trio has cultivated a cheerful deconstructive attitude to various musical traditions, mainly to experimental jazz. The crazy enthusiasm and energy, the eerie density of signals streaming out to the audience from the speakers frees up everything that is dried-up in jazz (even the experimental).

MALSTROM has now created four albums of avant-garde music that has an uncompromisingly direct impact – without a theoretical superstructure or meta-level – and the result is immensely entertaining. starting with tremendous, playful precision, both in the composed as well as in the improvised passages, they open up new jazz possibilities. Ten pieces were recorded for the new album Klaus-Dieter. These constantly change direction, parts are isolated and disassembled, then abruptly brought together to dash forward. Improvisation and composition interweave.

It would be all too easy to describe this diverse mixture as genre crossover – jazz, complex metal, rock, post-rock. Indeed, presenters like to include on their MALSTROM concert posters “Jazz Metal” or a sentence with “progressive” or something similar. That is not wrong, because the band with Klaus-Dieter in albeit an unusual trio cast (drums, guitar, and saxophone) continues to work on a form of experimental jazz which has great drive and frees the complexity of intricate progressive rock from all top-heaviness. And this electricity also contains surprisingly elegiac passages.