The live recording session #2 by Audrey Lauro, Veronika Mayer, and Gobi Drab unfolds an immersive soundscape with saxophone, electronics, and recorders, inviting listeners to move through changing sound worlds in which attention, memory, and time flow together. As part of our new series, Running Present – A Contemporary Log, on new music and experimental artists & albums – a review by Serge Bulat.
Before a note is played, the room is already alive. live recording session #2 invites the listener into a space where sound floats, bends, and folds – a landscape of breath, electronics, and intuition, where each moment feels open and full of possibility.
Recorded in Vienna in March 2024, the session brings together Brussels-based saxophonist Audrey Lauro, Viennese electronics composer and improviser Veronika Mayer, and recorder player and composer Gobi Drab. Lauro’s extended saxophone techniques, Mayer’s responsive electronics, and Drab’s Paetzold recorders and voice intertwine to form a field that is fragile, spirited, and acutely attentive. Mayer’s local presence as co-curator of the Klangmanifeste sound art festival situates the session firmly within Vienna’s experimental music ecology.
The music unfolds across a series of shifting landscapes. The opening piece, bells, is an immersive sound painting where every sound – natural, performative, designed, or imagined – draws the listener into a realm of wonder and heightened attention. From one ear to the other, perception is charted across an experiential map in which each moment arrives unexpectedly. map of unusual places expands this cartography into a terrain that becomes the map itself, composed of coordinates that feel coherent yet elusive. It is busy without becoming dense, offering space to navigate as an observer or, at times, as an active participant. One might become aware of their own body, set in contrast to the vast sonic space unfolding around them.
past moves into a kind of primordial futurism, where time becomes a coordinate while remaining non-linear. Electronics hover, pulse, and regroup, shaping a terrain in which memory and presence overlap. One’s past lingers like a ghost on the event horizon. The mind and musical body are already pulled into the black hole, emerging altered on the other side. The closing piece, finite, suggests a passage through a white hole, its dynamics shifting between quiet delicacy and oscillating, rippling vibrations. Time here is neither metaphor nor abstraction but a formula shaped through experience, where every gesture carries memory, anticipation, and motion.
Released on scatterArchive, live recording session #2 follows the earlier live recording session #1, offering another document of the trio’s live collaborative practice. The release foregrounds real-time interaction, shared listening, and the unfolding of sound in the moment. Rather than closing a chapter, it opens additional points of entry for listeners drawn to how attention, space, and improvisation continue to shift across different realities.
This session is not simply a document of improvisation; it is a space to inhabit, a map to navigate, and a site where sound, time, and attention converge, rewarding patient listening with new details at every return.
Serge Bulat