OM: Sudpol

Formed in Lucerne in 1972 by saxophonist Urs Leimgruber, guitarist Christy Doran, bassist Bobby Burri, and drummer Fredy Studer, the original quartet fused the raw voltage of rock with the open architecture of free improvisation, arriving at a sound they eventually dubbed "ElectroAcoustiCore." Studer's death in 2022, weeks ahead of the release of the anniversary album 50 (Intakt), 2022), might reasonably have closed the book. Instead, the three surviving founders did something a lesser band would not have attempted: they hired two drummers instead of one. Gerry Hemingway, longtime anchor of the Anthony Braxton Quartet, and Tony Buck, best known for his work with The Necks, stepped in as a package deal. Südpol, recorded live at the Lucerne venue of the same name in December 2024, is the first full document of this expanded lineup, and it confirms that OM's appetite for reinvention has not dimmed with age; if anything, it has gotten hungrier.

"Fast Line," a nearly ten-minute opener that plunges into churning, overlapping pulses, with Hemingway and Buck circling one another rather than locking into unison, generating a rhythmic density that never curdles into clutter. Leimgruber's attack is scathing enough to supply its own sense of urgency, and the piece shifts gears mid-stream, drifting into ethereal subplots before hauling the hectic opening statement back for the close.

"Gamelan" lives up to its title only obliquely, trading literal mimicry for a metallic, chiming interplay between Doran's treated guitar and his closed- hand picking, a quaint melody that toggles against the twin-percussion onslaught while Leimgruber's soprano threads through the texture like a lit fuse.

The nearly sixteen-minute "A Frog Jumps In / Im Unterholz bei Kyjiv" is the emotional center of the set, moving from skittering near-silence to full- throated collective roars without ever feeling engineered. Yet "Behind the Eye" offers something like exhalation, a comparatively spare meditation that lets Leimgruber's tone sit alone in space for the first time on the record.

The gamble here was always going to be whether two drummers could serve the band rather than just crowd it. Hemingway and Buck do not always resolve that tension—there are stretches where the two of them seem to be having separate conversations, politely ignoring each other across the room—but the unresolved parts are arguably more interesting than a tidy fix would have been. Five decades on, OM still sounds like a band chasing the next unstable idea rather than one content to guard the last.