The so-called analog, because handmade, techno is one of those niche musical phenomena that is harder to grasp than it might seem. Club music with other means is not just club music with other means, but often something branched and fused, an action between musical opposites.
The best example: the people of Munich who dare to walk between worlds Leo Betzl Trio, LBT for short. Unlike their technically no less talented Austrian colleagues Electric Guzziwho capture the hypnotic, repetitive qualities and futuristic moment of techno in the classic guitar-drums-bass band line-up and allow them to drift into the cosmic, LBT prefer to approach this music from a jazz perspective.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility that the three former regular members of the Harry Klein techno club, which has since closed, once resided Jazz Rush Big Band With an EP simply titled “House”, they also go the straight path of repetition and the “four-to-the-floor” rhythm of house music. But LBT are even better when they create a force field between the musical poles. So when, as on their most recent album “Abstract”, recorded live in front of an audience in BR’s Studio 2, they shape-shift between the lyrical expressiveness of great Scandinavian piano trios like the Esbjörn Svensson Trio or that Tord Gustavsen Trio and the gripping physicality and stringency of club music.
Her best number to date, “Alles was Odem hat,” is perhaps typical of this fruitful approach. It is wonderfully dynamic how Leo Betzl on the piano, Maximilian Hirning on the bass and Sebastian Wolfgruber on the drums first let the noble grooving piece gently spring forward and float, and then bring it back down to the dance floor with a brutal attack in the lowest registers. Grace and power, expression and danceability – you rarely get all of this as vitally and coherently brought together between jazzy virtuosity and technoid spirit as from these three fusion specialists.
LBT, Wednesday, January 10th, 8:30 p.m., Unterfahrt Jazz Club, Einsteinstrasse 42, www.unterfahrt.de