“Each musician has a distinctive sound. As the leader Savvopoulos sets the tone with glimmering sonics and crabby abstraction remaining open to the collective voice.” by Stewart Smith THE WIRE

“Here we have a five-piece improvising group based in Berlin, all names new to me, but they’re very good. Deterritorialization offers a maximal and rich carpet of notes and musical sounds, all coalescing in an accessible open-ended structure. The five players do contribute their distinctive voice segments to the whole. There are a lot of improvising groups who would give their left elbows for a debut recording of such assurance.” by Ed Pinsent THE SOUND PROJECTOR

“Lasting a whole one hour, this recording gives enough room from every individual voice to be heard, while the core of the quintet’s thinking is an act and response collective improvisation. It was a big surprise for me to realize that the five of them met, musically, for the first time on this recording. All of them stay, at least for most of the 60 minutes of it, energetic and quite mobile. I was impressed. A fine recording and a big pleasant surprise as well.” by Fotis Nikolakopoulos THE FREE JAZZ COLLECTIVE


“The hour-long performance is a true journey: diversified, exploratory, restless, and always surprising. Really, this is a grotesque album, all the more reason to enjoy it thoroughly.” by DÆV TREMBLAY CAN THIS EVEN BE CALLED MUSIC


“Cet album est un excellent témoignage du grand bénéfice qu’on peut tirer du travail collectif et de la combinaison de talents et de sensibilités, d’une véritable écoute qualitative, qualité qui sublime les initiatives individuelles d’artistes quasi inconnus du circuit. Un parcours truffé de belles surprises.” by Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg

“It is this concert that we hear on this release, presented without any editing. We enjoy one long extended improvisation divided into two parts of about 30 minutes each. Free-floating group improvisation with a sense for melody that has all five players taking equally part in their interactions. During this hour moments pass by where everything interlocks and the music lifts you, in contrast with parts where the improvisation meanders a bit unnoticed forward. So we witness an adventurous journey into the unknown.” VITAL WEEKLY

"There are a lot of challenges, and then the guitar comes to the fore like the one that is silent blue for a long time when talking, and when it finally turns on, you say to yourself - here, this is someone who thinks! The signed leader of the collaboration carefully orchestrates the events all the time, unobtrusively, almost imperceptibly. It dictates the direction of the compositions underground, but there is no hierarchy, every idea deserves consideration, which results in an endless chain of musical sketches, which often run out of tension, relaxation, climaxes." by Peter Kuntarič

As Derek Bailey puts in his seminal 1992 book on the nature and practice of improvised music, freely improvised music, variously called 'total improvisation', 'open improvisation', 'free music', or maybe most often commonly, 'improvised music' suffers from – and also certainly enjoys – the confused identity which its resistance labelling indicates. The lack of definiteness over its naming is, if anything, increased when we come to the thing itself. Diversity is its most consistent characteristic. It has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment, it has no prescribed idiomatic sound, the characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic and musical identity of the individuals playing it.

Free improvisation assumes a new experience, an unfamiliarity with what is to come, what is to happen, a total disruption of expectations. How much more intense and disorienting the experience becomes in the music of Anastasios Savvopoulos' OUXPO (Ouvroir d'X Potentielle). Each member of this Berlin-based, but remarkably international quintet – namely American trumpet player Brad Henkel, German tenor saxophonist Philipp Gropper, Greek guitarist and band-leader Anastasios Savvopoulos, German double bassist Felix Henkelhausen and Slovenian drummer Dré A. Hočevar – has an imposing resume of various musical adventures, but as a group, their music expresses particular qualities and raises challenging questions. OUXPO offers no customary constructions, no persistent prototypes. The improvising unit's two lengthy instant compositions here could be read as two vast chapters in a continuing story, following an abstract narrative of details.

The pool of five offers a seemingly usual, but here thoroughly matching instrumentation. The alchemy between the players undoubtedly works – what is more, it works blazingly. The sonic and musical personalities of the individuals – that Bailey talks about – define eventually this freely improvised session, and place it of the highest order. However, this document preserves the very first meeting of the players as a performing group, it clearly demands continuation. The music that you will hear on Deterritorialization is the quintet's complete Ljubljana performance, held at KUD Mreža's concert series FriForma at Klub Gromka on 19 September 2018 – without editing, literally as it happened.

László Juhász
August 2019

Greek guitarist, improviser and composer Anastasios Savvopoulos (1980) is currently residing in Berlin. As a self-taught composer, he is mainly interested in the temporal forms of experience and the complexity of auditory phenomena that impact subjective perception and memory. Encounters with the theater of Artaud and his radical emancipatory project of the body through ritual, gesture and speech; Deleuze's concepts of deterritorialization, multiplicities, difference and repetition; as well as Bergson's duration and intuition shape the conceptual body of his theoretical and practical direction.

Brad Henkel (1985) is a trumpet player and composer from the States, currently based in Berlin. With a primary focus on improvisation, using a broad color palette of pitched and unpitched sounds, he creates and participates in music which is rooted in the free jazz, contemporary composed and Echtzeitmusik traditions. He studied jazz trumpet in Los Angeles with Bobby Shew and Clay Jenkins, and improvisation and composition with Jeff Kaiser and John Fumo. He also studied improvisation with Tony Malaby, Ralph Alessi and other staples of the New York scene. / bradhenkel.com

Saxophonist Philipp Gropper (1978) was born in Berlin and began to play his chosen instrument at the age of 7. He studied jazz saxophone at the UDK Berlin and played with the concert section of Bujazzo for two years under Peter Herbolzheimer. He has since been busy as a freelance performer and composer, dedicating most of his time to developing his very own musical ideas. Gropper has recorded more than fifty albums and has been awarded several prestigious prizes. He has been a member of the Jazzkollektiv Berlin since 2009. / philippgropper.com

Felix Henkelhausen (1995) was born in Oldenburg, Germany and started with classical piano and cello lessons at an early age. Later he became interested in the double bass and started his pre-studies at the HfK Bremn with Detlev Beier at the age of 16. Since 2014, he is studying at the Jazz-Institut Berlin with Greg Cohen. Other of his mentors have been Robert Landfermann, Jim Black and Drew Gress. Despite his young age, he has played with international renowned musicians such as Nate Wooley, Gebhard Ullmann, Toby Delius, Lotte Anker and others. / felix.henkelhausen.net

Dré A. Hočevar (1987) is a Slovenian composer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Currently, he is conducting his PhD studies at the Centre For Research In New Music, University Of Huddersfield. The central subject of his research and composition praxis is .meta [dynamic cognitive-apparatus formation, application, and analysis systems]. He is the artistic director and founder of .alfabet, Institute For Research In Art, Critical Thought And Philosophy, and is frequently leading workshops, seminars, and lectures in composition, performance, research. / theōriaedoxa.com
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released September 1, 2019
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