* John Butcher - tenor/soprano sax - Georg Graewe - piano - Wilbert de Joode - double bass - Mark Sanders - drums * - CD1, tracks 1-10: in the studio recorded in Vienna, 11.3.2017 by Martin Siewert - CD2, tracks 11-14: live on stagerecorded at Konfrontationen Festival, Nickelsdorf, 18.7.2018 by Gerald Pally & Jens Jamin for ORF - * Mixed and mastered by Martin Siewert | cover painting: Sara Kowal | liner notes: Markus Müller | produced by Georg Graewe * "It happened to be my birthday, that day in October 1992 when I had the great fortune of listening to the frst incarnation of Frisque Concordance at the Ruhr Jazz Festival in Bochum (Germany), ingeniously curated by Martin Blume, who also played the drums in this quartet along with Hans Schneider on bass, offering his wonders. Fortunately for all of us, the concert was recorded and released as the frst of many outstanding Random Acoustics CDs less than a year later. Spellings, as it is titled, is testament to the unerring ability of Graewe and the constellations he designs, he facilitates, to go deep into the histories of improvisation and contemporary composition. Here, on Distinct Machinery, Georg Graewe and John Butcher, the Concordance's core, team up with Wilbert de Joode and Mark Sanders, both another two constants in the wider Graewe universe for quite some time. Structurally the four-some and its two realizations is to be understood as a pars-pro-toto for how exactly this universe operates and evolves. Schneider was one of the very early members of this poly-centric bundle, dating back to the legendary FMP releases from 1976 and 1978 by Graewe's frst quintet, a group the pianist had formed only a few days before his 18th birthday. Butcher, a collaborator for 30 years now, is (along with Frank Gratkowski) the most congenial horn counterpart to Graewe's fuid ways of sublime bridge-building. This is just a small sample of the ways in which Graewe develops his work: long-standing relationships perform expeditions into uncharted territories and then sometimes do it again, years later, offering Proustian moments of recognition plus, always, things never heard before. Continuities and disruption, known and unknown, frisque concordance and contenance angloise, as Martin Le Franc described the 15th century new distinctive style of Dunstable-English music. Distinct Machinery is just that. The combination of a studio and a live set very much distills all these qualities into diamonds, nuggets, and land-slides of sound ever unfolding. You buy one and you get two, but these two give you all. And it is not like these two are easily peg-holed sides of one coin. Listen to the drive and the dynamics of Hot & Cold in its two iterations here, studio- and live-setting, and you immediately realize this is not about simple dichotomies. There is a distinct romanticism in the abstract, there are planes of Ayleresk layers in the physical feel of Butcher's sometimes almost silent sound, there are distinct single-notes in Graewe's waves of still energy. There are the endless great plains of Sanders' roaring thunder flled with the warm hues of metallic star-breath-cymbal colors, there are de Joode's interstellar pulse-like sheets of legato, grounding and multi-mirroring it all. Some of the track-titles (in particular Desmodromics I - III of the live CD) hint at the magic of the musical mechanics at play. In general technical terms, the word desmodromic refers to mechanisms that have different controls for their actuation in different directions. Some of us are also reminded of the aura of a Ducati, which is more than the sum of its mechanical parts. Which is precisely where Frisque Concordance comes into play. When Ducati's chief engineer tells us in 1956 that "the specifc purpose of the desmodromic system is to force the valves to comply with the timing diagram as consistently as possible. In this way, any lost energy is negligible, the performance curves are more uniform and dependability is better", then we immediately realize that forcing someone to comply to something to make the performance more uniform is not a viable description of musical dynamics. But the idea of desmodromics also tries to lose as little energy as possible in order to achieve - as the Schlippenbach Trio has once called one of their albums - complete combustion. The Frisque does that with all means and languages and potentialities possible. In doing so it is like a living universe of complex interrelationships based on longue durée timelines." - Markus Müller, Berlin November 2020