Franz Hautzinger, Ignaz Schick, Sven-Åke Johansson

Rotations+ is a trio project of Sven-Ake Johansson with German turntablist Ignaz Schick and Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger recorded live at the beloved Berlin experimental venue KM28 in September of 2023. The collective improvisations are instilled with a deep interest in color and timbre, and each track offers a fresh perspective. While Johansson toggles to accordion on the album’s final track, squeezing tender lines alongside Hautzinger’s moody brass and Schick’s scratch-pocked layer of wobbly ambience that climaxes with a warped romanticism, the other pieces navigate the divide between sound and rhythm more viscerally.

Scuffed electronic tones, noisy beeps and blorps, and parched and puckered trumpet smears and cries, are accompanied by Johansson’s elegant sense of time. In certain places he brings an elegant pulse to the proceedings, providing a structure for his partner’s most abstract utterances, while elsewhere he turns his drumming inside out, as if translating the machinations of a tap dancer in slow motion. More often than not the music proceeds with a delicate touch and razor-sharp interplay even within the most fragile moments, delivering a heightened form of spontaneous sound sculpting—something Johansson has been doing since the early 1970s.