NEW ALBUM
ALL TOO HUMAN - because you're worth it
All Too Human
Because You’re Worth It 1.4
Tipping-Points
Fatalistic-Tendencies-1080-D
THE IF MACHINE
ALL TOO HUMAN
Marc Ducret: Guitars
Kasper Tranberg: Trumpet
Simon Toldam: Synthesizer and Piano
Peter Bruun: Drums, Synthesizer and Mopho
WITH:
Petter Eldh: Additional Synths
Anders Banke: Flute, Alto Flute and Bass Clarinet
Music by Peter Bruun
Produced by Petter Eldh and Peter Bruun
Recorded March 22nd-24th 2019 by Thomas Vang at The Village Recording, Copenhagen
Additional recordings by Petter Eldh at Galatea Studios, Berlin
Flute and Bass Clarinet recorded by Peter Bruun at BROWN NOTE, Copenhagen
Mixed by August Wanngren at Real Farm Studios, Copenhagen
Master and vinyl cut by CALYX Mastering
Artwork and phenakistoscopes by Morten Kantsø
Mirror design by Øivind Slaatto
Big thanks to Neill Cardinal Furio, Petter Eldh and Øivind Slaatto
Made with support from KODA, DJBFA, William Demant Fonden, Statens Kunstfond
“It was reminiscent of so much experienced music from the past and resembled nothing. In short, it was a fully unsolvable musical puzzle solved with entertaining bravura” - All About Jazz
“…the architectural work of the quartet was between classical balance and visionary audacity. Leaving at random only regrets, he fed our flags and questioned our neurons with an unusual strength of soul and therefore precious until the last resonance” - Culture Jazz
“A kind of magic carried by a quartet at the top, whose complementarity is incredible.” - Cityzen Jazz
“Fills out its artistic intentions with praise and in a completely convincing manner.” - Politiken
LIVE from Copenhagen 10.3.2018 :
Peter Bruun’s ‘All Too Human’
Because You’re Worth It...
Peter Bruun’s ‘All Too Human’ - Because You’re Worth It
including a real foldable Magic Mirror!
In 2017, Danish percussive pioneer Peter Bruun set out on an ambitious adventure with three likeminded improvisers. Under the ‘All Too Human’ banner, their first album (2017’s ‘Vernacular Avantgarde’) succeeded in bringing life to their creative vision and was heralded by listeners and reviewers alike. On their new offering, ‘Because You’re Worth It’, ambitions have never been higher and their collective vision has become clearer and more refined.
Bruun’s compositions are a blend of the sonically familiar and unfamiliar – like pop music from a parallel universe. Intricate formulas are used to manipulate listeners’ ears, intuitions, and musical expectations, catering to the highest common denominator. The material carefully manages to merge the catchy and comfortable with the fresh and thus far unheard. Songs are composed in the spirit of “bringing the avant-garde back to the people,” which means making these mature, sophisticated pieces accessible to any type of listener – not only those who revel in and are defined by the ‘avant-garde’. Instead, the overall mission is to share in the celebration of humanity through common understanding of music, poetry, and sounds – honoring the breadth of universal understanding and communication between band and audience.
REALFOLDABLE MAGIC MIRROR INSIDE
This deluxe package includes one foldable magic mirror and eight exiting animated phenakistoscopes, one for each song.
The new album, to be released in 2020 on ILK Music, is a musical love letter to listeners… Because You’re Worth It.
Peter Bruun (DK): Drums, Mikrokorg, and compositions
Marc Ducret (F): 6- and 12-String Guitars
Kasper Tranberg (DK): Trumpet and Cornet
Simon Toldam (DK): Moog, JUNO 60, and Phillicoda
Petter Eldh: Bass and electronics
Anders Banke: Saxophone, Clarinets and flutes
Producer: Petter Eldh and Peter Bruun
Migic Mirror design: Øivind Slaatto
Cover, animation and phinakistoscopes: Morten Kantrsø
MAGIC MIRROR TUTORIAL VIDEO and All Too Human WEB: https://www.peterbruun.info/all-too-human
Choose also you favorite streaming video channel for listening to the three singles
The If Machine: https://orcd.co/theifmachine
Fatalistic tendencies: https://orcd.co/fatalistic-tendencies
Tipping Points: https://orcd.co/tipping-points
Kasper Tranberg
is a composing improviser who plays cornet and trumpet and likes poetry.
Kasper performed and recorded as a sideman with international artist like Steve Swallow, Tim Berne, Michael Blake, Django Bates, Tyshawn Sorey, Gianluigi Trovesi, Yusef Lateef and Adam Rudolph.
Marc Ducret
is a self-taught unique guitar player who is bending the reality of the instrument to it’s outer boundaries as well as a composer.
Interested in all kinds of musical and non musical means of expression, Ducret plays - besides regular acoustic and electric guitar - acoustic and electric 12-string, fretless, baritone, soprano, 8-string.
Simon Toldam
is an exiting and acclaimed musician from the current generation. He is also a member of Danish label/collective ILK. Simon is famous for his own trio as well as his playing in the legendary Han Bennik’s trio
Peter Bruun
started playing drums at the Rhythmic Children's School in Copenhagen at the age of three. This became a life-long immersion into drums, music and composition.
Peter is an active member of ILK (Independent Label of København). ILK is a danish collective of musicians who releases music with absolute artistic freedom.
Peter is well known for his long engagement with Django Bates trio Belovèd (ECM) and Samuel Blaser trio (Hatology) among a variety of cross-boarder collaborations throughout europe and US.
The avant-garde: Works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox, with respect to art, culture, and society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation, and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer.
The vernacular: The language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people of a country or region. Ex: ’he wrote in the vernacular to reach a larger audience’.
Paradox: A person or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities …
BUY:
YOU WILL BE DIRECTED TO AYLER RECORDS TO FINNISH YOUR PURCHASE...
REVIEWS
POLITIKEN 6 of 6 HARTS
"...The overall result is an outstanding record that fills out its artistic intentions with praise and in a completely convincing manner."
Trommeslageren Peter Bruun er den mest originale med samtidsværket “Vernacular Avant-Garde, der havde en såre stærk uropførsel af Bruuns Kvartet, All Too Human under Copenhagen Jazzfestival.
“Vernacular Avant-Garde” kan nu nærstuderes og skabe berettiget forundring i studieindspillet version. Der er tale om nytænkende og gennemført original musik, som etablerer sit helt eget univers med den udtryksmæssige dobbelthed, som også ligger i den knudrede værktitel: noget kendt, tilgængeligt og noget ukendt experimenterende i ét.
Bruuns bas-synth mumler urovækkende i dybderne. Hans trommer falder i skæve, rockprægede mønstre eller pusler klangligt. Musikken er både umiddelbar, kontant og udfordrende. Den håndfaste trommelyd er spændt op imod luftige og sære elektroniske klange af Simon Toldam på synther som Moog og Juno 60 samt orgelet Philicorda. Kasper Tranberg yder en smuk og levende præstation på trompet. Der kan være tryk på, men tiltelnummeret besidder en skrøbelig skønhed med Tranbergs famlende spil i forunderlig indpakning. Og som væsentligt solistisk modstemme skal den franske mesterguitarist Marc Ducret naturligvis også fremhæves.
Ducret har opdyrket sin helt egen virtuose spillestil, men her formår han at glide diciplineret og fintfølende ind i Bruuns univers og udvide det med intensitet og klangrigdom. Det samlede resultat er en enestående plade, der fylder sine kunstneriske intentioner ud med bid og på aldeles overbevisende måde.
Politiken, Christian Munk Hansen.
(22.05-2018)
Citizen Jazz
“...Vernacular Avant-Garde is a haunting record. A kind of magic carried by a quartet at the top, whose complementarity is incredible."
Vernacular Avant-Garde est un disque envoûtant. Une sorte de féerie portée par un quartet au sommet, dont la complémentarité est incroyable.
Avec à ses côtés Marc Ducret, Kasper Tranberg et Simon Toldam, le batteur danois Peter Bruun est en terrain connu.Tout comme le trompettiste, il a récemment participé aux superbes Tower (volume 1) et Tower-Bridge du guitariste. Ducret avec lequel il joue également au sein du quartet et du trio de Samuel Blaser, dont le premier disque (Taktlos Zürich 2017) vient de paraître chez Hat Hut. Quant à Toldam, comme Tranberg, il est un animateur de la scène danoise et une vieille connaissance de Bruun.
Ces quatre-là nous proposent un voyage concis - moins de quarante minutes - mais dense. Il y a des moments de calme, apaisés, en forme d’invitation au voyage en des territoires inconnus (la seconde partie de « Follow Me ») ou de fable féerique, bouleversante (« All Too Human »), avec ce soupçon de mystère et de magie qui en fait tout le charme. Tranberg y est presque davisien ; les claviers analogiques apportent à la musique un côté terrien et décalé. D’autres passages sont plus puissants, complexes, pleins, portés par le toujours formidable Ducret et la subtilité du leader qui associe à sa batterie un clavier pour jouer la ligne de basse. La musique se tend, les lignes se complexifient, l’auditeur est emporté par le flux et l’énergie déployée.
Ces variations tout en fluidité traversent l’ensemble du disque mais se retrouvent également au sein des morceaux eux-mêmes. La réussite de l’album tient dans ces alternances et dans le dialogue continu entre complexité et simplicité, connu et inouï, ancien et contemporain, parfaitement résumés par le titre de l’album, Vernacular Avant-Garde.
Peter Bruun nous offre une synthèse musicale jubilatoire tant elle semble naturelle et accessible, faisant de ce disque une pépite à découvrir de toute urgence.
Cityzen Jazz, Julien Gros-Burdet
(11.03-2018)
"Overall, the music on this album is well written and arranged, with clearly composed and strict structures in place. However, more importantly the music on Vernacular Avant-Garde contains enough flexibility to take advantage of the musicians in the band, their own creativity and what they can offer to the music that really brings these pieces alive, full credit to Peter Bruun."
Peter Bruun's All Too Human - Vernacular Avant-Garde (Ayler, 2018) ****
By Chris Haines
Peter Bruun's All Too Human outfit is a quartet that consists of Kasper Tranberg, trumpet & cornet, Simon Toldam, keyboards, Marc Ducret, guitars, and Peter Bruun himself, on drums & synth. The music on Vernacular Avant-Garde is a mixture of jazz fusion, progressive, math, and post-rock, without it sounding like its something that's been thrown together as its clearly not. What we have here is six carefully composed pieces of music, with enough room and space to allow the musicians to be able to contribute creatively to the set of music, allowing the music to breathe when it needs to and at other times producing a rhythmically tight, but interesting set of musical sequences.
The album opens with 'Follow Me', a funky piece, complete with groovy moog bass line, syncopated horn melody and a lovely climbing chromatic figure that provides tension and musical direction. The piece is in binary form where the second-half of the piece completely breaks down into an ambient soiree that leads through to the end. 'All Too Human' starts with sparse percussion sounds from Bruun before being joined by some spacey sounding synths, recalling sounds I frequented more often with in the 1980's, something to do with the Juno keyboard that Toldam uses I suspect! The piece builds nicely and with the introduction of Tranberg's horn, it reminds me of Mark Isham's music from the same sort of time period, creating a sort of ambient music but with substance. The title track is the longest on the album, sporting contrapuntal chromatic lines, synth sounds that this time remind me of Magma's Udu Wudu album, and some subtle and freer interplay between the guitar and horn that's a nice contrast to the initial melodic section. 'Sunshine Superman', not the Donovan track, is a through composed piece that contains some great unison lines and solos from Ducret on guitar and Tranberg on trumpet, who both manage to get 'outside' the compositions, although Bruun's strict and mathematical sounding rhythm does its best to lay a solid foundation but due to its shifting emphasis creates an ideal pattern for the improvised content. Peter Bruun's slow drumming, full of displaced micro-beats and de-emphasising the naturally stronger ones, a la Mark Guiliana, is the star of 'Extended Mind', whilst the album finishes with 'Is That So Sir Names?', a bubbling and nervous piece that stops and starts by interrupting the flow with clever changes in time, irregular phrases, and skittering sounds, before gradually driving into a groove with some great chromatic lead work from Ducret. What's really nice to hear on this album is the different set of colours coming from the palette of the synths, and although they may not be to everyone's taste they are used with discretion and tastefulness, which really gives the music a different aural sheen.
Overall, the music on this album is well written and arranged, with clearly composed and strict structures in place. However, more importantly the music on Vernacular Avant-Garde contains enough flexibility to take advantage of the musicians in the band, their own creativity and what they can offer to the music that really brings these pieces alive, full credit to Peter Bruun.
"Vernacular Avant-Garde", folk avant-garde; Peter Bruun, 39, has not only a knack for musical paradoxes, but also a concept for it.
2019! Herrschaften, was für ein Jahr!
Starke Alben, starke Konzerte, und dann erst die Jubliäen:
„In a silent Way“ 50 (18.02.), „Emergency“ 50 (Mai) und „Bitches Brew“ 50 (August).
Die Jazzpolizei schätzt sich glücklich, gerade noch das vorletzte Konzert der Tournee eines Quartetts erwischt zu haben, das 2019 in der Live-Kategorie rocken, auf dem Tonträgermarkt aber erst 2020 einschlagen wird.
(Das aktuelle Album, „Vernacular Avant-Garde“, 2017, ist kaum mehr als ein Vorecho dazu).
„Vernacular Avant-Garde“, volkstümliche Avantgarde; Peter Bruun, 39, hat nicht nur ein Händchen für musikalische Paradoxien, sondern auch einen Begriff dafür.
Man kann ihn kennen als Schlagzeuger aus dem Django Bates Trio, aus dem dänischen Retro-Rock-Trio Eggs Laid By Tigers,
aber auch vom ganz anderen Ende der Fahnenstange, einem FreeJazz-Trio mit Samuel Blaser, tb, und Marc Ducret, g (der auch jetzt wieder dabei ist).
Musikalische Paradoxie: die Klangfarben sind absolut retro, sie sind nur unwesentlich jünger als die Sounds auf den drei großen Jubliäums-Sessions (s.o.). Die uralte Philips Philicorda kommt erneut zum Einsatz sowie zwei analoge Synthies (plus Effekte), bedient von Simon Toldam (Craig Taborn, vor zwei Wochen auf derselben Bühne, sei keyboard-Unterricht bei dem jungen Dänen empfohlen).
Und Bruun spielt Schlagzeug über weite Strecken nur mit der Linken, mit der Rechten tippt er Baßlinien in einen alten Synthie.
Die sind so phat, dass man PHAT schreiben muss.
Und hier treffen wir den Kern des Paradoxen: die Sounds sind retro, aber die Strukturen hyper-modern. Hier findet die Neuformulierung des Beat statt, ähnlich wie bei Anton Eger oder Petter Eldh oder Christian Lillinger.
Wenig ist vom Jazz hineingeflossen, viel aus dem frühen HipHop; downtempo beats werden so an die Kante geführt, dass man fürchtet, die Grooves fielen auseinander - sie werden so skelettiert, dass man sie sich mitunter denken muss.
Improvisation? Nebbich! Toldam wendet kaum den Blick von einer meterlangen Partitur. Der einzige ohne Notenpapier ist der Bandleader, er braucht es nicht, als Komponist hat er alles im Kopf.
Es sind ellenlange Themen, von denen man nicht ahnt, wohin sie führen. Ebenso rätselhaft & spannend die Ökonomie der Einsätze für Kasper Tranberg, tp und den ewig brillanten Marc Ducret, er ist ein einzigartiger Gitarren-Stilist.
Eine ultra-harte Nuß für Begriffsarbeiter; ist das noch Jazz?
Oder ist das nicht wieder mal Pop, wie er am besten von Jazzmusikern gespielt wird?
JAZZCITY - by Michael Rüsenberg
This is an article from Revue & Corrigée
What is it that strikes at first and is expressed most openly in this mass of copper, bass, strikes and electricity? Honestly, if one discards Marc Ducret's guitar, which escapes within the first twenty seconds for a soliloquy closer to the presentation than the chorus, the sound that suddenly shakes the membrane of our eardrums is so indivisible that it seems identifiable only in its very integrity. Thus, bass and percussion resonate with a common depth, but the trumpet of Kasper Tranberg also participates, by its roundness and precision, in this perfect cohesion. An eye cast to the formation teaches us moreover that there’s no bass player and that the deep vibrations that have just shaken our rib cage actually emanated from keyboards held by Simon Toldam or Peter Bruun himself, drummer and leader of this quartet. Which removes nothing from this first impression of total fusion.
It must be said that the four partners are not really foreigners, Bruun having already shared the scene with Ducret as part of the project Tower or Samuel Blaser Trio, crossed Tranberg's trumpet in the formation of the cellist Daniel Levin and played Monk with the keyboards of Toldam. As for the guitarist, if he meets this one (Toldam) for the first time, he is, we said, familiar to the drummer and has already had the pleasure of welcoming the trumpet player in the first Tower volume. We are therefore between people of acquaintance coming from “the same village” and speaking a common language, consanguine even in their cultural heritage and their European roots, more anchored in sum in the complexity of a post-modern writing than in the systematic reiteration of blues. No doubt that is what Peter Bruun is referring to when he evokes, on the sleeve of the album, the "paradox of a vernacular avant-garde" opposing in the same antinomy the formal proximity of homogeneous artists and their desire to break with tradition ... One can obviously wonder about the merits of a music speculating on its own contradictions but, since the artists intermingle to justify their work, if the bias supporting the creation should reflect the character of the work, that would have ended up being known ...
As far as we are concerned, that is the quality of the music and its ability to both move us and renew the genre in which it evolves, it seems that once again, in the case of Ayler Records, we did not have to worry too much. The sound density captures us from the very first seconds, but very quickly, it is the diversity within the mass that catches our attention, each focusing on its own game and the subtle or tangible signs emanating from Bruun’s “stooges”. Even more than the compositions which, despite their singularity, do indeed fit into a form of binary jazz rich in rhythmic and harmonic complexities, the freedom left to the performers, very real despite the exiguity of its setting, maintains this music at its highest level of creativity. Thus Marc Ducret, whose mutual fidelity that binds him to Stephane Berland is itself a foundation of the label, manages to express in a few measures the brilliance of a restrained passion as well as a true explosion of electric intelligence, and in the following sequence, morphs into a colorist as delicate in his choices as Simon Toldam on his keyboards. The latter also appears as a model of effective discretion, brushing the limpid canvases where his companions stand out all the more easily and decrypting, in perfect symbiosis with Peter Bruun, fun or formal enigmas which he has sprinkled his scores with, searching and dissecting their architecture to the point of delivering an seemingly obvious reading.
Between a rhythmist composer and visionary of his own music, a playwright decorator and analyst of the current subject and a free electron in charge of the devastation as the reconstruction of the completed work, Kasper Tranberg assumes the role of the poet, which no society can exist without. Mad melodist in the service of a needy king, he is both the trace and the atmosphere where Bruun’s music evolves, the breath and the note, the one whose sweetness counterbalances violence and power annihilates all possibility of inattention. The “coppery sound in a steel sky” of the poet Tranberg, like the sound of the quartet, is actually "all too human" in the context of the album and sees itself forced to expressing his most intimate experience as he wants us to forget about his virtuosity, whose brilliance nonetheless blinds us.