PNL & Kv Duo

The duo of Paal Nilssen-Love and Ken Vandermark is one of the most enduring and prolific partnerships in contemporary free improvisation. As a drum-and-saxophone pairing, they first collaborated in the late 1990s and have since built a formidable body of work across countless projects, most notably in The Thing, School Days, and the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet.

Their duo work is the essential distillation of their musical relationship: a raw, conversational, and intensely energetic dialogue. Vandermark’s compositional logic and melodic urgency meet Nilssen-Love’s volcanic, polyrhythmic power and orchestral approach to the drum kit. Their performances are masterclasses in spontaneous structure, moving from explosive, high-density exchanges to moments of fragile detail with relentless drive and deep mutual understanding. This duo represents a foundational axis around which a significant part of the modern European and American free jazz scene revolves.

The Lions Have Eaten One of the Guards

By Ken Vandermark & Paal Nilssen-Love

Screen Off

By Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark

Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark

Sorry, no results.

Please try another keyword

mp3-player
Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark
https://paalnilssen-love.bandcamp.com/album/screen-off

00:00

Available now on:

Bandcamp

The high impact duo of Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) and Ken Vandermark (reeds) has been working together at an accelerated rate since 2002, and they have put out seven albums of exceptional and wide ranging improvised music since then. Though they have both worked in many critically acclaimed groups- from the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Lean Left (with Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor of The Ex) to Double Tandem (with Dutch saxophonist, Ab Baars)- they have continued to return to their duo for more than a dozen years because it remains crucial to their creative output.

Now the duo releases “Screen Off” on PNL Records. This is their tenth album, and this time the duo have decided to look backwards at the last ten years of their career, although in a very unusual way. In collaboration with producer Lasse Marhaug they have gone through the numerous clips of live performances that exist on YouTube, unofficial documentation recorded and uploaded by members of the audience without the duo’s involvement. None of these clips were full concerts, neither were they recorded on professional gear, often containing artifacts that compresses and distorts the audio. The idea was to embrace the limitations of the format and to make a collage out of the material, but using only the audio and not the video from the recordings. By drawing inspiration from experimental cinema – especially the Structural film movement of directors like Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Tony Conrad – Marhaug set a rule of only 60 seconds from each clip should be used, and since the duo does not play short pieces the cuts would often be disruptive, cutting the music off in the middle of movements. The cuts were then assembled together not in a chronological manner, but rather what made sense musically, often jumping back and forth years in the process. The results was that this stylization doesn’t distance the listener from the music, but rather creates a viable document of activity, much in the same manner a film would – just with the screen off.

—

Ken Vandermark: reeds.
Paal Nilssen-Love: drums & percussion.

Produced by Ken Vandermark, Paal Nilssen-Love and Lasse Marhaug.

Live recordings from various YouTube-clips 2008—2018.
Edited and mastered by Lasse Marhaug.
All music by Vandermark and Nilssen-Love.