**2026 Stock**  Embrace 1: Jupiter Storm/Partial Intersect documents Polwechsel in an expanded, electronically entangled form, joined by pianist Magda Mayas and saxophonist John Butcher. Long associated with a hyper‑attentive, reductionist approach to ensemble sound, Polwechsel here rebuild their methods around prefabricated electronic materials, spatialised playback and tightly structured time‑grids, while leaving key layers completely free. The result is music that feels rigorously composed and yet perpetually on the verge of derailment: a set of intersecting systems where acoustic gesture, fixed sound and improvisation occupy the same charged field.

For “Jupiter Storm”, Werner Dafeldecker describes his process as starting in the machine. He composes on computer, then arranges pre‑recorded material - gongs, piano, complex modular oscillators - into a pre‑mixed, spatialised layer used for playback in performance. Around this, the musicians work with a time‑structured score, entering their “material‑solutions” at precisely cued points using stopwatches. Individual rehearsals allow each player to familiarise themselves with the electronic bed and to develop responses that are neither mere doubling nor opposition. Crucially, the low strings - cello and double bass - are left purely improvised, adding an unpredictable undercurrent to the grid of fixed media and notated interventions. The piece unfolds as a storm of overlapping resonance and interference, electronic and acoustic components folding into a single, restless weather system.

“Partial Intersect”, composed by Michael Moser, pursues the group’s transformation from another angle. Moser explicitly sets out to avoid practical habits, looking instead for sounds, electronic set‑ups or rule‑systems that make Polwechsel “sound and play in a way we have never done before”. The ensemble’s core - Burkhard Beins and Martin Brandlmayr on percussion, Dafeldecker on double bass and Moser on cello - is threaded through with Mayas’ inside‑piano work and Butcher’s tenor and soprano saxophones, both of whom are deeply versed in extended techniques and intimate, noise‑rich detail. Rather than serving as “guests” in a pre‑existing idiom, they become essential vectors in a new, partially intersecting space where breath, string pressure, drum skin and loudspeaker all behave as equally unstable surfaces.

Recorded in August 2022 at Musikschule Bad Goisern in Austria by Wolfgang Musil and Sebastian Pracher, the album captures the music with the kind of spatial clarity it demands: fixed‑media elements bloom and recede in three dimensions, while close‑miked acoustic events flicker at the edges of perception. Mixing by Dafeldecker and Moser emphasises these relational dynamics, allowing the listener to trace how a bowed cymbal might pick up and colour a pre‑recorded gong, or how a fragment of sax multiphonics can slip almost imperceptibly into the grain of a modular oscillator. Musil’s mastering preserves this dynamic range and depth, keeping the music’s quietest negotiations as present as its densest convergences.

Visually, Embrace 1 is framed with the same attention to texture and layering. Artwork by Teresa Iten and LP cover art by Michael Moser reflect the record’s concern with overlap, partial alignment and emergent forms, suggesting diagrams or maps of forces rather than literal illustration. Together, sound and image present a group still committed to the slow, careful excavation of shared sound, but unafraid to rewire its own methods using electronics, pre‑fabrication and expanded line‑ups.

As the first instalment in the Embrace series, Jupiter Storm/Partial Intersect sets a high bar: a quietly radical extension of Polwechsel’s practice that neither abandons their past nor repeats it, and a compelling example of what can happen when composition, improvisation and fixed media are treated not as separate domains but as overlapping orbits in the same gravitational field.