Experiencing a collaborative project by the idiosyncratic producer-composer duo—Austrian keyboard player Elias Stemeseder and German drummer Christian Lillinger—live or as a recording, throws you into an exploratory, inquisitive, multilayered, kinetic-sonic, electroacoustic journey. They suggest a post-genre utopia that draws inspiration from modern jazz, contemporary music, and sound art practices, equipped with a telepathic interplay of an inseparable sonic organism, a wealth of compositional strategies, instruments, production methods, and an everlasting process of creating an uncompromisingly personal sonic idiom through this complex synthesis of disparate modes of musical thought. They act like a sonic lab that questions common playing techniques, exploring, expanding, and rediscovering the sonic palettes of their instruments. On their live performances, the music becomes an arresting, constantly shifting, three-dimensional choreography of sounds.
Stemeseder / Lillinger - PENUMBRA II (Plaist, 2025)
On their UMBRA and ANTUMBRA projects, Stemeseder and Lillinger hosted like-minded improvisers such as Craig Taborn, Peter Evans, and DoYeon Kim. PENUMBRA II, which follows PENUMBRA (2023, both released by Lillinger’s label, Playlist), offers a further insight into the Stemeseder-Lillinger core duo’s work. conceived, developed, and manifested in real time, free of templates but rich in references. The Penumbra mode expands into radical sonic research methods and production processes, encompassing acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic settings. Stemeseder plays the piano, spinet, synths, and electronics; Lillinger plays the drums, percussion, synth, and electronics, and mixed the album, which was recorded live at Schwere Reiter art center in Munich in September 2023.
Each of the seven pieces offers a distinct, inquisitive approach to acoustic and physical space, signal processing strategies, self-manipulated samples, reciprocal feedback systems, composition, performance posture, aesthetics, and texture. All are articulated with structural precision. Each piece suggests its own musical environment and demonstrates how Stemeseder and Lillinger can instantly create a rich and layered musical universe out of a disparate, fleeting musical idea, being possessed by it but without attaching themselves to it. Surprisingly, despite the complex and dense dynamics, non-linear nature, and urgent kinetic energy, Stemeseder and Lillinger’s music flows in the most organic manner . Most likely, you will need a few focused sessions of listening to figure out what, and on how much level Stemeseder and Lillinger do at any given moment. But each listening guarantees more enlightening insights about the intriguing music.
Lillinger’s video work, projected onto their bodies and instruments, intensified the live performances with a visual dimension. This work acts as another aesthetic impulse for each piece, influencing posture and spatial arrangement, and offering new insights and perspectives.
These pieces stress the complex sonic-visual discourse of the Stemeseder-Lillinger duo and the synesthesia-like, utopian experience they seek to share. Sound and image, as structure and movement, are inseparable, and together they allow a renewed understanding of the duo’s transformative artistic process. Stemeseder-Lillinger seeks to create a unified experience of electroacoustic instruments, performances, and the distinct space, as all are part of the spontaneous audio-visual process that keeps negotiating the charting of its own topology, moment to moment.
Algol - Algol (Buh, 2025)
Ángeles fits perfectly into Stemeseder-Lillinger’s sonic vision. He is interested in the hybridization of aesthetics and searches for his own aesthetic vision through a deconstructed approach to the flute and its conventional musical language. He uses extended breathing techniques, preparations, hyper amplification, and electronic processing.
Algul takes the Stemeseder-Lillinger’s open system of real-time sonic construction, which operates at the intersection of composition, improvisation, and electroacoustic experimentation, but twists it with ethereal, percussive vibrations. Algol dynamics juggle seamlessly between atmospheric textures punctuated with fragmented, sometimes even explosive pulses, methodical timbral research, and microtonal sensibility. Like the Penumbra mode, Algol’s multilayered textures emerge and dissolve instantly within its post-genre equilibrium, but with surprising playful dynamics and with mathematical precision.
Argentine “undisciplinary” composer and sound artist Julián Galay, who wrote the liner notes, observed that Algol seems to compress the historical time of its traditional instruments - piano, drums, and flute, as well as its hybrid instruments - self-made aerophones, spinet, synthesizers, and samplers, just as stars compress their gravity until it concentrates into a single bright point. “That gravitational force dismantles any linguistic boundary: baroque, contemporary, experimental, jazz, and electroacoustics all become blurred. The result alters the past—like a great red giant star that, though long dead, continues to radiate light—the present, and therefore the future”.
Stemeseder-Lillinger’s music, just like Algol’s music, may be the free music of the future, always in motion, and always redefining anew its restless, expansive, and exploratory aesthetics.
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