Audiovisionen: Teichmann + Soehne at Kulturraum Zwingli-Kirche e.V. / Thursday, 19.10.2023

Teichmann + Soehne’s »Flows« is not so much the result of a collaborative process as it is a process in itself. Over the course of nine pieces, the Gebrüder Teichmann – Andi and Hannes – and their father Uli repeatedly find common ground between the very different musical styles, sound aesthetics, and subcultural codes they have internalised throughout their lives.

The combination of Uli’s background as a versatile jazz artist and multi-instrumentalist with his sons’ penchant for dub techniques, modular synthesis, and live sampling as well as their interest in electronic dance music take on ever-different shapes. »Flows« released on the occasion of Uli’s 80th birthday, is as joyful, lively and free-spirited as its makers.

It took the three musicians decades to get together to jam. Uli and Lu, the mother of Andi and Hannes, ran the legendary Jazzclub Kneiting between 1978 and 1983 while he also made a name for himself as a musician who, besides jazz, is knowledgeable in a plethora of music styles from all over the world and has an instrument collection to match. Naturally, Andi and Hannes rebelled against this versatility by opting for simplicity. Already as pre-teens, they formed a punk band and once they got a whiff of the burgeoning techno scene, strayed even further from their father’s path. They eventually moved from their native Regensburg to Berlin where they made a name for themselves with a slew of releases on seminal labels like Disko B or Kompakt before starting to more regularly collaborate with musicians from the realms of Contemporary Music, Improv, and Sound Art.

Similarly, Teichmann + Soehne can be thought of as a human-musical collage. It is a meeting of three different musicians who all have in common that they have occupied alternative spaces and perfected a variety of musical styles and subcultural codes throughout their lives. When those flow into each other, this necessarily creates something that is as unique as the nine tracks collected on this album. This indeed makes their music flow — across different generations, between different musical ideas and genres, into previously uncharted territory.