PRESS
♦♦♦ Selected as one of the best albums of 2023 by Polityka, Nowa Muzyka, and Jazzkultura's Mery Zimny; Best Jazz on Bandcamp, January 2024 ♦♦♦
"A heady blast of electronics, field recording and wild collective improvisation summoning a rich seam of emotion and solidarity." – Antonio Poscic, Album Of The Week, The Quietus
"Elegant and remarkably poignant... A truly moving work." – Spencer Grady, Jazzwise (★★★★)
"Drop dead gorgeous music...steeped in minimalism, atmospherics, and a post-jazz genre-free adventurism." – Dave Sumner, The Best Jazz on Bandcamp
"A unique album [that] discovers a new world of emotions and sounds." – Bartek Chaciński, Polityka
"A beautiful, incredibly atmospheric album." – Rob Cope, The Jazz Podcast
"Intensely atmospheric ... A seamless mix of post-rock introspection, glacial sweeps of textured guitar, inquisitive drum patterns and yearning woodwind." – Sid Smith, Prog Magazine
"Absolutely brilliant... a captivating and atmospheric journey through experimental jazz and ambient music... otherworldly and yet very evocative." – Bernard Clarke, RTÉ lyric fm
"Slowly unfurling delights that take a little a very long way." – Andy Cowan, MOJO Magazine (★★★★)
"A powerfully emotive and at times indescribable experience. There are elements of post rock, cinematic scoring, ambient jazz and numerous other intersecting worlds, yet this music feels beyond labels." – Bob Baker Fish, Cyclic Defrost
"A highly immersive listening experience... An intimate, mysterious and hypnotic sonic ritual." – Eyal Hareuveni, Salt peanuts
"Highly experimental, emotional and yet mystical... Branches of post-jazz, post-rock and post-minimalism crossover, into the earthy world of the recognisable and yet unfamiliar." – Dominic Valvona, Monolith Cocktail
ABOUT
My first project after relocating to Poland in 2018 was a British Council-supported residency at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków. I wanted to explore and express what it meant for me—a Detroit-born, London-raised descendant of Polish Jews—to return to my ancestral homeland. After a decade of involvement with the UK experimental music scene, the change of environment gave me both the impetus and the space to recalibrate my musical compass.
At the start of the residency, I had two points of reference: first, I would use field recording as a means of processing my new surroundings (literally as well as figuratively); second, I would form a new trio with two Polish musicians. I'd been following the Polish experimental music scene for some time, and two names seemed to appear on all the records that really resonated with me. Individually, and often together, Wacław Zimpel and Hubert Zemler have contributed to some of the most exciting Polish-based projects of the last decade: albums by LAM, Saagara, Zebry a Mit, To Tu Orchestra, Resina, Opla; not to mention their brilliant solo releases.
I spent a few months making field recordings around Poland and Ukraine, looking for sites where remnants of the countries’ Jewish histories could still be felt—neglected cemeteries, forgotten monuments, former ghetto districts reclaimed by ever-evolving cities—and listening to what these spaces sound like today. Then I travelled up to Warsaw for the first rehearsals with the trio.
At this point, I still planned to compose a suite of music in response to the field recordings, which would form the basis of the trio's set. But within seconds of our first improvisation, I realised I didn't need to write any music for this group. Without a word of discussion, the music I'd been imagining for the past year was just happening, totally organically. It felt like coming home.
I mean that in several senses. First, the music formed a bridge between different phases of both my own life and my family history, reversing a migratory path trodden by my great-great-grandfather over a century ago. Second, having grown up making music with my brothers (saxophonist Nick and drummer Simon), I feel uniquely comfortable in a reeds/guitar/percussion trio format. It’s also the instrumentation of several bands that have had huge impacts on me, such as Berne/Ducret/Rainey and Lovano/Frisell/Motian to name just two.
Our gigs in Kraków and London—extended improvisations around my field recordings—are still among my favourite performances ever (see YouTube for footage). The freedom I felt on stage came so naturally it was as if we'd been playing together forever. I knew we had to record as soon as possible.
In March 2020, after many attempts, our diaries finally aligned to allow a day in the studio together. But then COVID-19 hit Poland and, literally the night before we were due to travel to the studio in a forest near Tarnów, we went into lockdown.
It wasn’t until May 2022 that we were finally able to make this record. With the support of a Creative Scholarship from the City of Kraków, we spent three days improvising in Dwa Domy studio outside Warsaw. I came away with hours of material, which I spent the next year crafting into this album.
Initially I thought making the field recordings was a way of assimilating myself into my new surroundings. During the process of making the record, however, it became apparent to me that it was the other way round: I was absorbing aspects of my adopted environment into myself. So whereas the trio's live performances have foregrounded the field recordings as sonic prompts for us to respond to through improvisation, in the studio we began with our own ideas. With five years of music making behind us now, a shared language has evolved that somehow evokes those spaces I recorded in even without the sonic cues. Only in post-production did I incorporate a couple of the field recordings, and in such a way that (I hope) they are not clearly identifiable as "other" material, but rather deeply embedded into the texture of our music.
The track titles include the names of cities the trio has played in, and/or places where I made field recordings, weaving the band's five-year history into the fabric of the album. "Clattering (Kraków)" opens with a recording I made in Kraków's Planty park shortly after arriving in Poland in 2018. At dusk, the park becomes a gathering place for jackdaws, who completely dominate its soundscape. (A "clattering" is the collective noun for a group of jackdaws.) I would end up living a few steps away from where I made this recording, so these birds became my intermittent neighbours. Only later did I learn that European jackdaws, like my own ancestors, are known to migrate from Poland to Britain.
Album closer "Lord, Have Mercy" is a hymn from the Ukrainian liturgy, which I arranged for multiple clarinets all played by Wacław. The rendition opens with a field recording I made outside the Latin Cathedral in Lviv in 2019. It’s offered as a gesture of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, just across the border from Poland, and another of my ancestral homelands.
In a further nod to the project’s theme of cultural cross-pollination, the band’s name Cut The Sky (formerly Roth/Zimpel/Zemler) is taken from a sentence in the English translation of Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz's book The Street of Crocodiles, while the album title is the Polish transliteration of the Hebrew phrase meaning “sacred fire”.
– Alex Roth
CREDITS
Cut The Sky:
Alex Roth – electric guitar, field recordings, processing
Wacław Zimpel – clarinets, electronics
Hubert Zemler – drums
Music by Alex Roth, Wacław Zimpel and Hubert Zemler,
except #6 traditional arr. Alex Roth
Produced by Alex Roth
Recorded by Michał Kupicz at Dwa Domy, Piaseczno, May 2022
except #6 recorded by Wacław Zimpel at Stary Teatr, Kraków, March 2023
Mixed by Alex Roth and Michał Kupicz except #5 mixed by Alex Roth
Mastered by Michał Kupicz
Supported by a Creative Scholarship from the City of Kraków (Stypendium Twórczego Miasta Krakowa)
My heartfelt thanks to Wacław, Hubert and Michał for bringing this music to life. Thanks also to Andrew Plummer, Nigel Roth, Joy Mendelsohn, Tomasz Furmanek, Etel Szyc, Arek Blomka, Jakub Nowakowski and Ada Kopeć-Pawlikowska.
