The Music & More Impro (MMI) Festival curates new, intimate musical and dance constellations, featuring artists from different generations and nationalities, and even different artistic disciplines, who have never played together—or at least not in that particular formation—for a one-time encounter and experience. The Festival began in Munich in 2016 but moved to Barcelona for its third and fourth editions, and returned to Munich in 2025.
The MMI Festival has released seven albums from its 2025 edition so far, documenting meetings between John Butcher and Marta Warelis, and Agustí Fernández and Lucía Martinez, among others. The last album in this series is of a trio of Catalan, Barcelona-based dancer Sónia Sànchez, who innovates the flamenco dance legacy with Japanese Butoh and Body Weather; fellow Catalan, Salzburg-based hyper-pianist Jordina Millà Benseny, who was introduced to the improvisational world by Fernández (who has also played with Sànchez, in a duo with Millà, and in the MMI Festival), plays with Barry Guy, and has collaborated with dance and theater groups before, including with Sànchez in Trio Mars; and Viennese turntables and electronics wizard dieb13 (aka Dieter Kovačič), who performed before with Millà.
This trio’s set opened the third and last day of the festival and was recorded live at Einstein Kultur in Munich in May 2025. Obviously, the album does not offer the full experience without Sànchez’s expressive face and dance moves, but you can hear her feet pounding the floor. The 51-minute free improvised piece begins with Millà producing delicate, otherworldly friction and percussive sounds from inside the piano, subtly extended by dieb13’s humming electronics. Slowly, it morphs into a resonant, enigmatic, and poetic texture, spiced with dramatic, fragmented pulses.
dieb13 kept introducing surprising, processed, and noisy sounds that stimulated the tension and disrupted any attempt to surrender to a familiar course, and mid-piece, he even adds a heavy, hypnotic, Fire! Trio-like pulse, and samples of vocal artist Phil Minton (dieb13’s long-time collaborator), while Millà transformed the grand piano into a twisted, restless harp. And just as this improvisation reached its chaotic climax, it gently slides into a cathartic coda, as if the trio has equipped its audiences with heightened sonic and visual awareness for the sober awakening that comes after such a masterful performance ends.
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