Quark cs866

Quark is the debut album of the Berlin-based experimental trio of American percussionist Stephen Flinn, French alto sax player and flutist Sylvain Monchocé, and South Korean tenor sax player Jung-Jae Kim (who recorded before with Flinn the quartet album 5 in the Afternoon, Creative Sources, 2025). The album was recorded at Orange ‘Ear Shop/Living Space as part of their series of live sessions in Berlin-Friedrichshain in November 2024.
These three improvisers have established their idiosyncratic sonic palettes. Flinn has spent decades experimenting with traditional percussion to create distinct sounds and phonic textures, and to find new extended techniques for expressing himself in diverse musical settings; Monchocé has developed unique extended techniques for his instruments, producing sounds that are in between electronics and acoustic, with a special interest in breathing granular sounds, multiphonics, overtones, and silence; Kim pushes the boundaries of sonic aesthetics and sound definitions: exploring and expanding dimensions of musical parameters, digging into infinitesimal sound territory, and approaching a new concept of composition (that he calls «Naturous Music»).
Quark offers five free improvised pieces that can be described as distinct. mysterious journeys in fragile, reductionist sound, or methodical research in timbral diversity and sonic color. Often, it is difficult to know who and how sounds are being produced. Silence, statis, and spatially resonant and acoustic experiences are essential elements in this trio’s aesthetics, as the trio creates unpredictable, rich, and nuanced soundscapes that flow through meditative waves and tranquil moments. The last. longest piece, «Himalayas», demonstrates best how this trio creates a cinematic, rich, and dramatic narrative.
This trio sketches its very own minuscule sonic universes, suggesting an intimate, but highly personal and immersive listening experience. Eyal Hareuveni (salt peanuts)

"Quark" is less a collection of songs and more a map of invisible particles - sound atoms colliding, refracting, disappearing. The Berlin-based trio Stephen Flinn (percussion), Sylvain Monchocé (alto sax, flute) and Jung-Jae Kim (tenor sax) have embraced the free-improvised tradition, but rather than roar or overwhelm, they often whisper, sketch, breathe. If you expect fireworks, you’ll sometimes get sparks; if you expect chaos, you’ll find quiet algebra of tone and space. It’s an album that rewards patience and attentive ears.
What strikes first is the contrast between the monumental and the minuscule. Take "Frozen Lake" opening the record: long, patient, almost glacial in its unfolding. The percussion isn’t just rhythm-keeping; it becomes texture - ice cracking, water shifting, weight settling. Monchocé’s alto and flute hover over those sonic strata with breathy overtones, pauses, multiphonics; Jung-Jae Kim pushes the tenor into wide, perhaps even primal calls, but never in a way that destroys silence. The tension between sound and its absence is one of the central moves here.
Then there are tracks like "Stepping Stone" or "Yaks", shorter, more fleeting, that act like “interludes”-not filler, but glimpses of movement, of trajectories the larger pieces have hinted at but haven’t yet fulfilled. They are necessary: they break up the grand architecture, reminding you that this isn’t about continuous ascent but about fractures, something shifting beneath the surface.
The title "Quark" is telling: in particle physics, quarks are basic components, never seen in isolation but crucial to structure. So too this trio deals in fundamental sonic particles: what happens when you isolate the breath between sax notes, the decay of a cymbal, the space around a flute’s timbre. Their use of extended techniques (multiphonics, overtones, breathing into/resisting the instrument) means you often hear more than what is “played” - you hear what is almost unintended, the edges of timbre, the residue of gesture.
Production is clean but not clinical. Recorded live in Berlin, mixed and mastered in LA, "Quark" retains the immediacy of performance. You can sense the room, the careful spacing, the way silence is allowed to stretch - which in this kind of improvisation is as important as any note. Moments of quiet are not vacuums but charged pauses: the breath before a sax line, the minute rustle of percussion, the echo that lingers.
If there is a risk, it’s that some listeners may long for melodies or moments of lyrical “hookness” - pieces that carry you by a more familiar path. "Quark" rarely gives that. It’s not about melody in the pop sense; it’s more about texture, shape, dynamics, the slow burn of sound and space. For those who want “something to hum tomorrow,” it might not always deliver. But for those who want to listen as if entering a cavern, tracing mineral veins of sound, it’s deeply rewarding.
In the end, "Quark" feels like an exploration of what lies between sound and silence: the micro-gestures, the space between breaths, the latent energy in little noises. It’s immersive, demanding, sometimes austere - but never sterile. It’s a record you don’t just play, you inhabit. For fans of improvisation who seek subtlety, risk, and the beauty of small things rendered large, "Quark" is a luminous proposition. Vito Camarretta (Chain D.L.K.)

Quark, recorded in Berlin last November, is the latest album from Creative Sources, with new-to-me Sylvain Monchocé (alto saxophone, flute) joined by Stephen Flinn (percussion) & Jung-Jae Kim (tenor saxophone) — both having appeared elsewhere on the label of late. The interaction itself, described by Monchocé (who does have a prior duo release with Daniel Studer) as walking "cautiously deep into silence, meditative waves, and tranquil moments" per "a spatial fullness of acoustic resonance with small, delicate, and exquisite sound sources," has a ritualistic character, with a general austerity building through broad continuities from quiet to a sometimes raucous clatter, eventually ebbing away.... (An overall comparison can be made to the sound of e.g. John Butcher & trio album Induction, recorded back in 2019, also acoustic, there perhaps with more of a sense of rhetoric & song per se... plus some pointillism.) Such a characterization would then seem typical of music from Flinn, who first appeared for me here (in a May 2017 review) alongside Viv Corringham in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and then on the dynamic instrumental trio album Itinerant (reviewed that October, also from Creative Sources). I'd noted (in August 2020) his solo album Red Bell as well, but didn't mention him explicitly with the quintet album Letters to Milena, as released in 2023 & noted here in discussions in both October 2023 & 2024, i.e. as part of Ernesto Rodrigues surveys. In fact, Letters to Milena presents a direct comparison to the previous collaboration between Flinn & Kim (as just released in June), double album 5 in the Afternoon (recorded in Berlin in March 2024), a generally sparse & "everyday" album (continuing for Rodrigues some of the explorations of e.g. Distilling Silence, albeit perhaps less "distilled...") including Guilherme Rodrigues & Eric Bauer (electronics) as well, i.e. the ensemble from Letters to Milena with Kim instead of Nuno Torres. And then the two (Flinn & Kim) had already released (also on CS) Chess Music in 2023, also with Guilherme Rodrigues — with whom Flinn also released The Age of Bronze last year, in a trio called Symbolist including Roy Carroll on electronics (thus differing from the acoustic Quark, which nonetheless suggests similar imagery...) — as well as Axel Dörner. Moreover, although I'd (to my surprise) yet to mention Kim here, he's been active lately too, particularly with Meari: Instant Waves (recorded also in November 2024, a few weeks after Quark... & released already late last year) with Ernesto Rodrigues & Alvaro Rosso: From a perspective of Rodrigues' work, that album very much recalled Setúbal for me (again with Torres, reviewed here May 2020, i.e. the height of lockdown), so I didn't know what to add at the time, although it did announce Kim as a player in this space.... And Kim has just released as well (also in June, on Relative Pitch) Shamanism, an all-Korean double duo album of saxes & drums, recorded in 2023.... (Shamanism is about as far from the textures of Quark as can be, but let me note too that Monchocé — mainly a classical flautist? — plays Korean instruments as well, although not there.) In some sense then, Quark reprises other "two horns & percussion" formations, but does so with generally deconstructed sound materials (e.g. largely eschewing rhythmic pointillism) along extended timbral arcs. (So there's no primitivist jungle here.) The result is a sense of affective shearing, beginning from a sort of breathy static, momentum coming into focus, simmering, shifting along various lines of flight, stormy yet ultimately calming... almost akin to a natural phenomenon. Yet despite the easy summary & austerity, Quark definitely rewards more concentrated attention (something it can also seem to resist, again perceived as a sort of shearing...), maybe even requires it. Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts