Stephan Thelen - Worlds In Collision (2025)

When I finished working on the second Fractal Sextet album 'Sky Full of Hope,' I had no clear idea about my next album project. The only thing I knew at the time (July 2023) was that I wanted to explore more of the ideas that David Torn and I had worked on during the recording of Sonar‘s 'Three Movements,' ideas that had more to do with the sonic possibilities of the electric guitar (especially feedback, distortion and delay) than with traditional 'musical' elements like melody or harmony.

I had also been revisiting 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,' a groundbreaking album by Brian Eno and David Byrne that had used speech samples long before samplers were invented and that also had been an important and influential album for David Torn. This album inspired me to include polyrhythmic percussion (acoustic and electric) to a much higher degree than I had ever done before. I mentioned this in an e-mail to Fabio Anile, who told me that the Eno/Byrne album had also been a life-changing album for him and that he would be very interested in contributing to this project.

Fabio asked me right away if we could include sampled voices into the fabric of the pieces. Much earlier in his career, he had played music in a band that was influenced by the Eno/Byrne album and in which he had experimented with speech samples. For more than 20 years, he had been carrying an original idea in his head how to treat voices in a rhythmical way and thought that - with the help of modern technology - this might be the right time and the right project to bring his ideas to life. So we decided to make speech samples an integral part of this project and immediately - thanks to the wonders of the internet - started working together to create the pieces on this album. It was a period of intense collaboration and I am very grateful to Fabio for the many new and fresh ideas that shaped the outcome of this music to a very large degree.

One of the first pieces we worked on was 'Palermo' and we both agreed that it was the perfect blueprint for the kind of music we wanted to create. The title comes from field recordings that were used on this track and that Fabio had made at the famous Ballarò market in Sicily. The basic 11/4 rhythm is similar to the rhythm that was used in 'GongGong,' a track from my album 'Transneptunian Planets' with Jan Peter Schwalm. David shines on this track with his ferocious and eruptive guitar that sounds like a cross between a primordial elephant and a distorted muezzin call.

'Bullet Train' is a track that goes back to a Radio Osaka piece in 7/4 called 'König der Fliegen' and features Yogev Gabay's drumming in turbo mode. 'Worlds in Collision' is a (for me) rare track in 4/4, but don't worry, there is also a simultaneous 5/4 beat going on for the polyrhythmic twist. Fabio came up with the title because of the many (sonic) worlds that collide in this and the other pieces. 'Atomic' started with the rhythmic structure that was also used on Sonar's 'Skeleton Groove' and also on 'Circular Lines,' a piece I wrote for the Kronos Quartet (a 3 against 4 against 5 polyrhythm). It uses a sample from President Harry Truman's famous speech in 1945 about the use of the atomic bomb. 'Kosmonaut' is another track that is based on two Radio Osaka tracks (Zero Shift and Broken Symmetry) and features one of my signature rhythms in 11/4.

'Voices from the Ether' is a multi-layered track in another favorite rhythm of mine, this time in 9/4. At first, we thought the piece might be too 'traditional’ for this album, but Fabio's electronics, radio voices and ethereal sounds brought it right back on track and gave it a surreal quality. Jon Durant's fretless guitar lines provide an emotional depth and poignancy that makes it - in my opinion - a worthy addition to this record.

I am very happy with this album and hope that you enjoy listening to it as much as we did making it. A heartfelt 'thank you' to all musicians who helped make it possible, especially to Fabio for the enthusiasm and the energy that fueled this project from the very start.