News

Album premiere: Inside The Baxter Building – ‘Seldom Somber’

• 3rd Mar 2016

We’re proud to be premiering the new album from Swiss trio Inside The Baxter Building today – released on 4th March via Morpheus Records, ‘Seldom Somber’ is a groundbreaking offering from this contemporary, experimental group of improvisational artists.

A celebration of the vast world of sound and the intricacies and nuances that cut to the very heart of the definition of what music can be, it’s a dizzying and grand project that combines electronic soundscapes with brass instruments. Acoustically generated textures are manipulated in real time using analog and digital effects, resulting in a record that’s both ambitious in scope but still accessible in nature. Let yourself sink into their unusual world with a full stream of the album below.

We caught up with Simon Petermann from the band to find out more about the record:

Who are Inside the Baxter Building?
Inside the Baxter Building are a trio from Berne, Switzerland. The group consists of myself (Simon Petermann) (tb, efx), Sam Würgler (tp, efx), and sound artist Fabian Gutscher (electronics). Together we explore the possibilities of real-time audio deconstruction by processing the sounds of our wind instruments. Each one of us started to develop his own electronic setup independently. In 2013 we started to work together. Since then we’ve refined and enhanced our setups and got them all connected. Now we are able to grab every single sound coming from each workstation and we can remix our music live during the performances. We see ourselves as explorers of contemporary capabilities of live audio processing, in relation to and in combination with acoustic instruments. We refer to the Baxter Building as a laboratory, where new gadgets are developed and as a home base for our work.

What is this record about for you guys?
It’s about sound! We discovered, that playing our instruments and our computers, we can generate so many different sounds. Every time we play, we discover some new combinations in our effect chains. Finding the way to this music was not easy, as we had no role models. For us, this record will also be a benchmark for our future work, when we will continue to develop our music and our working process.

Can you describe the recording process?
For this one we tried different ways of making tunes. We mostly improvise our music, but for this record, we wanted to go deeper and write some things down before we started recording. We ended up using graphical score sketched out to define the dramaturgy of individual pieces. But there are also other ways in which we prepared our songs: the title track „Seldom Somber“ for example originates from an improvisation in our rehearsing space. We always record ourselves during rehearsals, and this extract was really good, so we kept repeating the mood until we were satisfied with it. Then each of us jotted down some notes to remember what he was doing.

The recording session itself took place in a lovely old house in a secluded village up in the Swiss mountains. It was still winter and it was totally silent. For a week we locked ourselves up to concentrate on our art. We actually never left that building during this whole session! In the living room, we installed our gear and routed our channels to an additional computer for the recording. All we did during this time was work on our music, plus we cooked, ate and slept. I think, you can hear this winter silence on the recording. We had a great time and it’s a great stack of memories.

What’s next for you guys?
In April we will play a release tour to present our album to a wider audience. We will be on the road for 12 days and we’ll play 10 shows in cities all over Germany, Austria and Switzerland. After that we’ll start to work on a movie that features experimental sessions with three different visual artists. We’ll go to their ateliers, put up our gear and play a performance together. The aim is to record the mutual impact on each others work. We’re going to release that movie in the coming winter.

Listen to ‘Seldom Somber’ here: