MAW - A Maneuver Within (2022)

Eli Wallace, Frank Meadows and Jessica Ackerley are a trio based between New York City and Honolulu. They met through the thriving experimental and improvised music scene in Brooklyn, having come to the city via their respective locations of California, North Carolina and Alberta. With various configurations of professional and musical collaborations between each musician over the past few years, they have honed a unique musical language and chemistry as a collective unit.

The pieces on 'A Maneuver Within,' the debut album by NYC/Honolulu-based trio MAW, are the product of an acutely transitional recording session from October 5, 2020. After years of lively sessions and discussions across the New York improvised music scene; Jessica Ackerley (guitar), Eli Wallace (piano), and Frank Meadows (bass) considered it a requirement to document a convergence before Ackerley’s looming move to Hawaii. Up to that point in the pandemic, collaboration and indoor group improvising had been severely limited, and much remained uncertain. What would have once been an artistic gesture packed within busy schedules felt in context like a glass of water in the desert, an impossibly rare and necessary opportunity. The ambient chaotic energy of that time was sharpened during set-up when the trio and engineer René Pierre Allain received news that Donald Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. The resultant headspace became an unhinged cocktail of joy, nostalgia, caution, absurdity, anxiety, and renewed invigoration. Fiercely kinetic splashes of conceptual frameworks and material exploration emerged in an urgent yet tempered group dynamic that recognized both the weight and the levity of the meeting. The result are recordings that set the tone for a new, unique group identity that has prompted continued collaboration and discussion. MAW seeks to present an aesthetically untethered voice, motivated not only by a love of exploration with “absolute sound," but by a desire to explore elevated modes of preparation and execution.