Description:	CD on Honest Jon's
	Format:	CD
	Genre(s):	Dub Techno
	Label:	Honest Jon's
	Price:	£11.29
	Availability:	Dispatched within 2-5 days (on average).

5
...according to our Brett on 03 July 2009.

Moritz von Oswald of Basic Channel/Maurizio/Rhythm and Sound legend has thankfully come through his mild stroke of last year and is now fronting the Moritz von Oswald Trio along with Vladislav Delay and Max Loderbauer. As touched on in this month's lead Wire article, the 'trio' in the name alludes to a jazz influence as the setup seems to have come about through a desire to improvise with electronic dubscapes in the live arena so I guess it's something of a bonus that the recorded album, Vertical Ascent, has come out as well as this. We had it on through the office speakers earlier and while obviously of a very high quality it didn't quite project itself onto us while we were all busy beavering away on other things but now I'm sat listening through headphones the richness and fine details present in their sounds are dancing around my head a treat. It's a laid back, mid tempo sort of affair from start to finish and flows organically through its four tracks and 43 minutes with melodies generally more suggested than clearly hawked. The style will be familiar to Rhythm and Sound fans (though certainly different enough to keep things interesting) with subtlety definitely the order of the day, a refreshing change when everyone else seems to be going for 'bigger, louder, deeper' all the time. God, I sound like a right old man. Honest Jon's have done a nice job with gatefold packaging on both the CD and double LP formats and hopefully the trio will be over here to play sometime very soon!

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What their label says...

Through Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound — his collaborations with Mark Ernestus — Moritz von Oswald first of all conjured from thin air, then comprehensively mapped out the grounds of a deep exchange between real-deal Jamaican dub and classic, Detroit-style techno. The duo’s accomplishment and influence are immense. The repercussions of their work within electronic dance music have been incalculable.

 
Take Don Letts’ word for it — when he is asked in a recent documentary film which dub music holds sway nowadays, he says there is nothing out there for him, nothing from JA, or the US, only Rhythm And Sound. And the cutting-edge originality of Burial, for one notable example amongst hundreds, is steeped in the Berliners’ aesthetic and musical innovations of the past fifteen years.

 
Though emphatically a departure, Vertical Ascent retraces various signatures of the earlier styles — the fastidious density of sound, the massive bass and detailed upper registers (‘a frequency massage’, Ricardo Villalobos has called the album),
the stripped, stepping repetitiousness, the seriousness.
But this is a different team of musicians, and striking differences stem from the qualities of live performance (the driving, clattering percussion in particular, and the loose, improvisatory approach), the exploded palette of sounds, including a trace of steel drums, something like a cuica.

 
Vladislav Delay is a drummer and electronic musician from Finland — like von Oswald, trained in classical percussion (whilst the third member studied classical piano for twenty years) — who released a landmark album on Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction imprint, before working with a diversity of artists (under pseudonyms like Luomo and Sistol), from Massive Attack to the Scissor Sisters. On Vertical Ascent he plays home-made metal percussion.

 
From Munich, Max Loderbauer was a partner in the ambient duo Sun Electric. Behind the scenes his work has ranged between Tresor and Can’s Spoon Records. In 2004 he teamed up with Tobias Freund to form NSI (Non Standard Institut). On Vertical Ascent he plays synthesizers, alongside von Oswald, who also contributes Fender Rhodes and additional percussion.

 
At the heart of Vertical Ascent is a dream crossing of Basic Channel, Larry Heard and Can, as at home with calypso as it is Stravinsky.