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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.) |