"Serious cultural studies people will tell you what a large and complex part the metaphor of "the German forest" plays in European culture. A sense of being-in-nature, as opposed to the perfumed salons of the French Enlightenment, and of managing nature for mutual benefit runs very deeply through German literature, art and music; sometimes put to questionable political ends, sometimes excessively romanticised, sometimes just a smokescreen for harsh economic interests. But durable and emotionally commanding all the same.

The late Oscar Peterson recorded several times for Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer at Villingen, on the edge of the Black Forest. Peterson told me that the mere knowledge of that landscape beyond the studio walls had had an effect on his playing: "more open, maybe, simpler, breathing in a different way . . ." It might seem a jump, from the Deutscher Wald to Oscar and from Oscar to the remarkable music of Die Unwucht, but there is a similar air blowing throughout. Christopher Kunz and Florian Fischer recorded their music at a little garden plot in Langenzenn, where there is a famous summer solstice festival and where there has been an imaginative Shakespeare festival celebrating the playwright's own strikingly imaginative contrasts of city-and-court on the one hand, the forest and nature on the other.

These associations are so hard-wired into us, we may not be particularly aware of them. The great German poet and translator Michael Hamburger helpfully pointed out that even in the most hard-boiled of proletarian fiction - he picked "Michael Gold"'s Jews Without Money as the obvious example - the city was only ever the phenotype, while the country (represented in Gold's novel by Central Park) was the archetype.

We think of jazz and improvisation as indoor musics, sometimes even a little airless, and often - when such habits were permitted - wreathed in cigarette smoke. Generally speaking, jazz was only played outdoors at summer festivals, and yet as one digs back into the music's history and pre-history, it's clear that its origins were also plein air.

Forty five years ago, after being invited by Joachim-Ernst Berendt to play at the Free Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and percussionist Han Bennink made an open air recording called Schwarzwaldfahrt, a dark ride through the Black Forest, using birdsong, water and found percussion as additional but integral instruments. Kunz and Fischer don't go quite so far, but there is a strolling, sauntering (the true pace and tempo of philosophy) quality to their music that somehow heightens rather than minimises the sense of not just being in the open air, but allowing it to breathe through the music.

The duo listened to the music of Enno Poppe - whose Wald for four string quartets happens to be one of my favourite modern works! - as inspiration but the music that they make is not a palimpsest in that sense. It is music that is, in the words of American poet Wallace Stevens, "the cry of its occasion", a music that seems to resonate outwards from the instruments but meets no resonant or artfully deadened studio wall. It simply continues into ever larger spaces. One remarkable quality of the recording you are holding is that each time you listen - and you will want to listen many times - the music feels ever so slightly larger, as if additional notes and more emphatic dynamics have been added each time. The greatest lesson in listening I ever had was from an old woodman in a Scottish forest, where in an imported version of German Nachhaltigkeit, I cleared underbrush from around native trees for a summer. One morning, pausing for breakfast, he asked me how many birds were around. Apart from a crow in a tree and couple of chaffinches waiting hopefully for crumbs, I could see none. He bid me close my eyes and listen, and one by one a small consort of distant bird-calls and - songs began to tune up. That is the discipline this remarkable music requires. Demonstrably, nothing changes from one audition to the next, except the level of detail and quietly dramatic interaction of parts that you will begin to hear. As poets from Shakespeare to Heine have recognised, "the forest" is not just about grandeur and most expansive of gestures; it is also about intimacy and there is a remarkable intimacy to Kunz's and Fischer's music (not the out-of-doors playfulness of Brötzmann and Bennink), The forest is both inhuman, wild, and, because it houses us and to a degree depends on us, profoundly humane. You'll find these qualities here as well. Focus, breathe and listen."-Brian Morton, January 2024