Babylon-Suite is the first album by the Swiss duo of the pianist Vera Kappeler and the drummer Peter Conradin Zumthor, issued by ECM in 2014. It is a suite in eleven parts, commissioned for the Origen Festival Cultural in the Swiss Alps. The music stays mostly in low registers and dark colours, between composed form and improvisation.
Kappeler and Zumthor have played together as a duo since 2010. Zumthor is a self-taught percussionist who also works in new music, theatre and sound installations. The duo has received recognition awards from the city of Chur and the canton of Graubünden. The suite was commissioned by Giovanni Netzer, founder of Origen, and premiered in August 2012 in Tinizong, in Graubünden. For the recording Kappeler plays piano, harmonium, toy piano and voice, and Zumthor drums, toy piano and voice. It was made in June 2013 in the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, Manfred Eicher as producer and RSI Rete Due as partner. The booklet carries texts by Netzer and Peter Rüedi.
The Babylon of the title is that of the Book of Daniel, with its lion's den, its fiery furnace and its visions. The music does not illustrate the story, and Rüedi's note warns against hearing it as programme music. Das erste Tier opens with bass drum and breath in the lowest range of the piano. Four pieces called Tor (gate) return through the suite as points of passage. Between them come a traditional song, Ne Pidu Ja Do Lesa, and two one-minute miniatures named Bontempi. Each also wrote one piece alone, Zumthor's Annalisa and Kappeler's November.
The reviewer of The Critic's Chair on RNZ Concert in 2014 heard music "jazz at heart", though "of a very mittel-European ECM variety", and praised its spacious, mystical sound. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews described the suite as "a reconfiguration of text into texture". ECM's own note speaks of a duo that leaves spaces and ellipses for the imagination, Kappeler's finely detailed touch carried by Zumthor's drumming. The duo's second album, Herd, appeared on Intakt in 2021.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2363, first released on 28 March 2014.
