Namid & Sondervan - Namid & Sondervan (Album) (2021)

Impossible is also possible
He hadn't shown himself when the universe was created, and He also sent his cat to the little big bang in the garden of an Antwerp squat. It was black and she was walking under a ladder. Everyone saw that it was good. God just has to believe us.

The occasion – a late summer bar going seasonally into the fall – had brought Namid and Dago Sondervan together. A jazz quartet and a live coder. The analog with the digital. Vincent Brijs' saxophones, Fré Madou's double bass, Sara Meyer's alto sax, Maarten Moesen's drums and Sonic Pi's algorhythm-and-blues. It all went into the particle accelerator and then they had to wait for a collision of atoms.

The elect in that court today witnessed the birth of a new kind of fusion. A fusion of electrons and positrons for whom the attraction turned out to be greater than gravity. A child of quantum love.

It must have been about the first time a code cracked itself and a computer started syncing. Artificially intelligent became organically smart. One big, whimsical, rolling improvisation.

An attempt to capture a big bang in sound and image: Weather Report and Frank Deboosere, The Sahara and the Tundra, Squarepusher and Pullover, Motown in Oneohtrix Point Neverland, Praxis and String Theory, Marc Moulins Placebo with Effect, Sun Ra and Moondog, Uncanny Valley of the Silicon Dolls, Luchtbal in Addis Ababa, man-machine learning, the Titanic band on Das Boot, anarchy in Parliament, modal modules, cyber punk funk and future kraut shock.

So I have no idea how you can describe something like that, let alone record it on tape, that constant, haphazard movement, centrifugal and centripetal, orbital and total loss. A snapshot in a super collider, knowing full well that what you record is gone and will never be again.

But the record does exist. There is a trace of the uniqueness. Space and time curved to the singularity of an LP. Something that cannot be repeated live, and therefore makes you all the more crave another, but then a completely different set of circumstances. To the next impossible merger of Namid Sondervan. (Johan Faes)

Artwork & layout by Tom Tosseyn & Raphaël Vandeputte