23/02/2024
OUT TODAY!
"The Knapsack, The Hat and The Horn” is a unique album of improvisations in an acoustic setting featuring Norwegian guitarist Hein Westgaard, U.S. violinist Katt Hernandez, and the Swedish drummer legend Raymond Strid. Recorded in a single day in Gävle, Sweden by Jon Fält, the unique instrumentation of plucked and bowed strings with percussion leads the music sometimes into abstract territory, other times into a kind of psychedelic, hypnotic folk music. The title is taken from the lesser known Brothers Grimm story of the same name, about one of three brothers who ventures into the forest and discovers different objects with magical properties, eventually making him the ruler of the entire kingdom.
Hein Westgaard says about the project:
“Playing unamplified with a drummer, violinist and a steel string acoustic guitar is a very fragile situation - especially since I play without a pick or other preparations of my instrument - but luckily Raymond and Katt are such great listeners and amazing improvisers, making it possible for everyone to contribute equally and beautifully to this special session. I have wanted to do an improvised project with a violin and drums for a long time, and this also happens to be my first record where I play completely acoustically on the guitar, two things that I am very excited about. With help from sound engineers Jon Fält and Francesco Toninelli - who are both great musicians in their own right - we managed to bring out some of the more subtle sound details of the recording session, while always trying to preserve a naturalistic sound image. I am really happy with how this record turned out, and I sincerely hope some adventurous listeners out there will resonate with it as well.”
Hein Westgaard is a Norwegian guitarist, improviser and composer, currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. In addition to his own genre-bending Hein Westgaard Trio mixing folk, rock, country, free jazz and disco, he can be heard in the post-minimalistic quartet Ototoi, working with conceptual sound-art with Ensemble Ektos, in duo with the Lithuanian double bassist Aurelijus Uzameckis or the New Zealand pianist Alexander Ventling, playing ad-hoc free improvised constellations, or simply performing in the solo acoustic guitar format where he focuses on his own instrumental songs in the fingerpicking tradition. Raymond Strid is one of the most important voices in free improvised drumming in Scandinavia. Particularly inspired by some of the European master drummers like Han Bennink, Paul Lytton and Tony Oxley, Strid's first concert was 30 September 1977 and he subsequently performed in a variety of local groups in Stockholm. In 1988 he formed the Swedish trio GUSH together with Mats Gustafsson and Sten Sandell. From that point work has also included a wide number of groupings and projects such as Guy/ Gustafsson/Strid (Tarfala Trio), Crispell/Jormin/ Strid and the free jazz trio LSB (Fredrik Ljungkvist and Johan Berthling). The Electrics (Axel Dörner, Sture Ericson and Ingebrigt Flaten (Joe Williamson replacing Flaten in 2011)) was formed in 2000 and that same year he became a member of the Barry Guy New Orchestra.
Raymond Strid works constantly with occasional ad-hoc groups and temporary meetings. He has been touring and participating regularly at major improvisation festivals in Europe and North America. He also considers that, since around 2005, his playing moves stylistically between free improvisation and free jazz, sometimes mixing the two. Raymond Strid also teaches improvisation, methods and aesthetics. Katt Hernandez is a renowned violinist from the USA, living in Sweden since 2010. Katt is classically trained on her violin but she has also studied composition, electronic music, jazz, Eastern European folk music and improvisation.
Katt Hernandez plays mainly free improvised music and is a veteran of the improvisation and experimental music scenes in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. Katt has performed in contexts ranging from underground venues to large concert halls alongside an incredible array of musicians, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, and performance artists including Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Jonathan Vincent, Gordon Beeferman, Joel Grip, John Berndt, Matt Samolis, Gene Coleman, Audrey Chen, Saul Levine, Zack Fuller, Erik Ruin, and many others.
