Nissen Mosh & Asger Nissen feat. Valentin Gerhardus, Thorbjørn Stefansson & Marius Wankel - Precious (2023) [Hi-Res]

Nissen Mosh is the latest project from Danish-born, Berlin-based saxophonist Asger Nissen. The quartet, composed of fellow emerging Berlin artists and long-time collaborators Thorbj?rn Stefansson (bass), Marius Wankel (drums), and Valentin Gerhardus (piano), tackles Nissen's original, highly-structured improvised music with a telepathic charge.

The group's debut album, Precious, is a collection of pieces that draw formal influence from Modern Jazz, the contemporary German avant-garde, and early New Music, and in more subconscious ways, from genres like rap and R&B. Nissen compresses grooves into textures and motifs, conceals songs within songs, and weights his melodies not on a tonic, but a cluster of tonalities.

He is brimming with ideas. The band fills them out, finds their edges. They practice meticulously. The result is a unified, live- wire sound: Stefansson and Wankel lay a heavy foundation, and Gerhardus' piano voicings crack open the melodic possibilities for Nissen's alto like light through a prism. Both on stage and on record the group is fierce and exacting, but never prone to flights of ego. Instead, they move deftly over the shifting rhythms under their feet, darkening, brightening, fluttering apart, then rushing back together, tight as a valve seal.