Solo

Julius Gabriel’s music, in its only seemingly abstract nature, is haunted by the past lives of saxophonists whose sound swept through time like an unheard gale. In Dream Dream Beam Beam, his first solo album, the German saxophonist weaves together his idiosyncratic musical influences to create a fluid mantra of circular patterns, overtones, and eruptions of free jazz — a possible synthesis of a long jazz tradition intersected by imaginative intrusions of drone and noise. In Ætherhallen he continues along this path, drifting through psychedelia and detouring into minimalism. In Geminga he uses the spatial dimensions of an ancient chapel in Portugal to expand his improvisation on soprano, tenor and baritone saxophones. In Eyes in Orbits he invites the listener into a state of prolonged intensity, where a continuous drone becomes both meditation and overload. Born out of new sounds and rhythms the musician discovered during the pandemic, Tales from the Subterranean, his most recent record, embodies a fusion of primordial energy and inventive exploration.