CD: Living Ghosts

Living Ghosts" by the Michael Wollny Trio invites the listener on an immersive and spontaneous journey in which past compositions evolve in real time through collective improvisation.

The album captures an evening in the spring of 2024 when the trio performed completely intuitively, guided only by the shifting spirits of their past compositions. The evening was filled with moments where the familiar themes of their songbook unexpectedly emerged, sometimes lingering briefly, sometimes taking new, unexpected paths. These "ghosts" of the past were reinterpreted and allowed to evolve in real time, reflecting the trio's deep, ongoing dialog with its musical history.

"Since the release of our last studio album 'Ghosts', the trio has performed the material from it on several tours and at all kinds of venues - sometimes purely acoustic, sometimes as a mixture of electronic and acoustic sounds.
As the pieces gradually lose their ties to specific arrangements, questions such as the key, the mood or even the creation of a setlist are a thing of the past. New repertoire mixes freely with old; different doors, connections and reinterpretations can open at any moment. When we start our concerts now, we never know which fragments of which pieces will emerge or in which order they will unfold. In other words, the concerts have become beautiful séances where the ghosts of the trio's songbook visit us at will. On some evenings they appear briefly and disappear again after just a few bars. On other evenings, individual motifs within a theme not only expand, they also weave new stories.
This album captures one such evening in the spring of 2024, when almost nothing was predetermined. In fact, we had forgotten almost everything about that evening until we heard the Saarländischer Rundfunk radio recording months later. What we heard was the trio communicating with the shifting spirits of their past, who vibrantly crowded onto the stage and literally began to live among us.
We are delighted to share this memory of a wonderfully haunting evening, reminding us once again that "all songs are living spirits, yearning for a living voice" (Brendan Kennelly).
Michael Wollny