Stefan Keune / Sandy Ewen / Damon Smith: Two Felt-Tip Pens: Live At Moers

This recording from the Moers Festival in May 2023, Germany, is dedicated to the late Hans Schneider. Bassist and label curator Damon Smith has made it a lifelong practice to seek out and collaborate with his musical heroes, a list that includes Jaap Blonk, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Kaiser and Vinny Golia. Naturally, that list also honors pioneering bassists like Joëlle Léandre, Peter Kowald, Bertram Turetzky—and Schneider, who passed away in 2024.

Joining Smith for this performance are American guitarist Sandy Ewen and German saxophonist Stefan Keune. Keune shared a long-standing connection with Schneider, performing alongside him in both a trio with drummer Achim Krämer and the iconoclastic King Übü Örchestrü. Smith and Ewen, for their part, have cultivated a deep musical rapport over many projects, including the recently issued Munich Sound Studies Vols. 4, 5 & 6 (Balance Point Acoustics, 2025).

The track titles are drawn from Schneider's artwork two felt-tip pens, cream, butter, oil, red wine and salt on paper, an evocative piece also used as the album's cover image. The recording opens with "Cream/Butter," a nearly 20-minute journey that finds Keune's saxophone chattering and trilling like an agitated bird above the textured scrapes and reverberations of Ewen and Smith's string work. The duo sounds like the shifting moorings of a vessel resisting unseen tides. Keune's playing recalls the techniques of Evan Parker and John Butcher, with skidding overtones, multiphonics and stuttering phrases that seem to hover and dart. Smith, ever a sculptor of sonic tension, steers the trio between stillness and abrasion with masterful control.

This ensemble functions as a true improvising triangle, equilateral in design, with each voice fully integrated into the whole. Clichés and formulaic exchanges are eschewed in favor of spontaneous, organic interaction. Even in moments of individual spotlight—like Smith's bowed conclusion to "Oil"—the playing remains tethered to the group's shared vision. Ewen, with her guitar placed flat across her lap, manipulates tones through touch, pressure and an array of found objects, sculpting soundscapes that range from fragile resonance to metallic intensity.

The result is a performance that not only pays tribute to Schneider's legacy but channels his spirit—textural, unorthodox and unyieldingly adventurous—into a present-tense act of collective creation.

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