Spoerri, Bruno / Reto Weber : Controlled Risk

WRWTFWW Records announces the official reissue of long lost Swiss electronic jazz, experimental, computer music gem Controlled Risk by Bruno Spoerri and Reto Weber.

There are experimental musicians, and then there are musicians who simply refuse to recognize the border between acoustic and electronic music. Swiss saxophonist, composer and electronic-music pioneer Bruno Spoerri had been crossing that border since the late 1960s, building Switzerland’s first private electronic studio in 1970 and moving from saxophone through synthesizers, Lyricon and, by the mid- 1980s, the Synthophone — a MIDI saxophone developed in Switzerland. His curiosity connected him to the emerging international computer-music underground and figures including Bob Moog, Wendy Carlos and Joel Chadabe, while his early electronic-wind experiments occupied the same rarefied technological territory as Suzanne Ciani.

Percussionist Reto Weber came from the opposite direction: away from the conventional drum kit and towards an ever expanding universe of hand percussion, found sounds and instruments discovered through travel and musical exchange. As early as 1973 he was playing with Ghanaian musicians Nana Twum Nketia and Papa Oyeah Makenzie, absorbing rhythmic languages without smoothing away their differences. Spoerri and Weber began working together in the 1970s, releasing the astonishing live The Sound of the UFOs in 1978 and subsequently playing hundreds of concerts together. One musician was wiring jazz into the machine; the other was opening it toward the whole rhythmic world.

Ten years after The Sound of the UFOs, that dialogue reached another level with Controlled Risk, originally released by Konnex Records in 1988. Recorded live to two-track at Powerplay Studios in Maur, Switzerland, on April 20 and 21, 1988, the album catches Spoerri on saxophone, synthesizer and Synthophone opposite Weber’s arsenal of percussion, with virtually no safety net between action and tape.

The opening “Love Power / For Papa” is dedicated to Papa Oyeah Makenzie — the Ghanaian musician Weber remembered as capable of entering such an unstoppable state while playing that “Now Papa is playing” became its own philosophy. From there the record keeps short-circuiting the distinction between ancient and futuristic: hand-played rhythms collide with digital processes, saxophone mutates into electronic signal, and acoustic gestures trigger strange synthetic responses.

“Das Stück mit der Maus” salutes computer-music pioneer Laurie Spiegel and the possibilities of controlling music with a computer mouse; elsewhere, on “Drum Song,” “Berimbau Electrico” and the title track, it can become genuinely difficult to tell where Weber ends and Spoerri’s electronics begin. This is not polite fusion and not academic computer music. It is physical, funny, raw, hyper-alert music — technology treated as an improvising instrument rather than a replacement for musicians. If you need coordinates, think less European jazz fusion and more the restless, anything-goes energy surrounding late-80s downtown New York and the early Knitting Factory: jazz, electronics, global rhythm and new technology thrown into the same room to see what survives.

WRWTFWW Records now brings Controlled Risk back into circulation, newly remastered and presented with new liner notes by Swiss jazz writer and curator Rudolf Amstutz. Heard nearly four decades later, the remarkable thing is how little of it feels trapped in 1988. Spoerri and Weber were asking questions that electronic musicians are still asking now: where does the human gesture stop and the machine begin? Can digital technology make improvisation more spontaneous rather than less? Can electronics, jazz and non-Western percussion meet without one becoming decoration for another? Controlled Risk answers by refusing to answer — everything remains in motion. What once sounded like an eccentric collision of jazz, MIDI and percussion now feels uncannily contemporary: an adventurous, joyful and seriously strange document from two musicians who understood that the future of music would not belong to machines or humans, but to the sparks produced when the two are allowed to play together.

This limited reissue follows previous WRWTFWW releases involving both artists: Voice Of Taurus, Rare & Unreleased 1971-1998, Musiques Légères (1976-1982) by Bruno Spoerri, and The Sound Of The Ufos by Bruno Spoerri & Reto Weber.