Schneider / Serries (Schneider Collaborations, 2024)
The duo album of Serries and German experimental, free-improv,
avant-rock and noise drummer Jörg A. Schneider (known from the free
jazz-drone-dub duo Roji with Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida, a
frequent collaborator of Serries) was recorded at Schneider’s home base,
the Loundry Room in Hückelhoven, Germany, in June 2023. This is the most
radical and varied album of these three new duos. Series plays a
distortion-heavy, mean electric guitar and pushes Schneider’s manic,
primitive drumming to extreme terrains on the opening piece “Muscle
Steam” but on the following “Enhance The Machine”, Serries suggests a
much more reserved, twisted kind of ballad, accompanied by fragmented
rhythmic patterns of Schneider. “Mechanical Collapse” threatens to drown
in another manic, noisy freak-out and “Complex Particle System”
experiments with a dark and noisy cinematic soundscape. The album ends
with the sparsely melodic “Force Regeneration”, and already calls for
continuous chapters of this stimulating duo.
Christian Vasseur & Dirk Serries – Floating Simularities (Creative
Sources, 2024)
French guitarist Christian Vasseur describes his music as free of any
form of dogma and exploring new sound universes with such exotic
instruments as archlute, mohan veena, Weissenborn-Harpa and electric
10-string lap-steel guitar. Vasseur brings to this guitar duo an
11-string classical guitar, tuned in quartet-tone, while Serries plays
on archtop guitar, often with a bow and objects. Floating Simularities
was recorded live at the Kapel Oude Klooster in Brecht, Belgium, and
Serries was responsible for the recording, mixing and mastering. The
seven intimate and almost chamber duets explore tension-filled, resonant
acoustic timbres. Sometimes these duets sketch surreal textures or
suggest brief stories, and at other times flirt with delicate,
oriental-sounding elements, as in the most enigmatic, beautiful
gamelan-like “The Traveller Surprised By His Dream”, with Vasseur
adding wordless chanting.
Dirk Serries & Trösta – Magnetar (Projekt, 2024)
Magnetar takes Serries to his formative ambient era, then working under
VidnaObmana and Fear Falls Burning pseudonyms, in a second duo album
with fellow Belgian alto sax and electronics player-sound
engineer-producer Trösta (aka Nicolas Lefèvre), following Island on the
Moon (Consouling Sounds, 2022). The album was recorded live between 2021
and 2023 at Serries’ favorite Sunny Side Studios in Brussels, operated
by Lefèvre. This 102-minute album offers atmospheric and peaceful yet
quite melancholic, free improvised dreamscapes and drones of Serries’
expansive, effects-laden guitar lines, resonating with great reverb the
subtle melodic phrases of Trösta. A highly immersive listening
experience that highlights the close and powerful magnetic fields
Serries and Trösta share.