"It is the fourth dimension, which we do not get hold of. We as humans are condemned to move in our three-dimensional world and as a result to be at the mercy of time. And yet there are moments when, despite the restrictions imposed on us, we manage to play with this very time, to juggle with it and to perform dances on its axis. "Draw from the source" tells us about such an artistic balancing act.

Anthony Braxton once explained his affinity for duo improvisation because this instrumentation would allow a person-to-person conversation. The duo as a field of encounter and as a medium for cultivating old musical friendships. The duo, however, that we hear on the present recording goes far beyond this definition. Sheldon Suter and Marco von Orelli played together in the sandbox as children. At a time when they were not yet aware of their future musical career.

So before they formulated their first musical statement as artists, Suter and von Orelli had already stored a living archive of collective memories. "Draw from the source," the album title, aptly refers to this common source from which the two draw. But this source alone would not have been sufficient. Imagine a duo that has understood each other blindly for decades. We would be witnessing an insider dialogue, a conversation impossible for outsiders to decipher. The nuances of such a conversation would remain hidden for us.

Patience is a great virtue. And although the two musicians have played together in numerous formations over the past decades, "Draw from the source" is their first recording as a duo. Their acoustic collaborations in trio with Max E. Keller ("Blow, Strike & Touch") or in quartet with Tommy Meier and Luca Sisera ("Lotus Crash") have also been released on HatHut. The electrified and electronics- infused music of their formation Big Bold Back Bone, as well as numerous independently created productions, underlines the urge of both musicians to constantly explore and map new terrain.

And so for "Draw from the source" they have also conceived a subtly networked system of coordinates that uses place, space and time as sources on several levels. The mostly short improvisations are spontaneous reactions that reflect the extraordinary spaces in which they were recorded: The first half of the album was made in the landmarked Bernoulli Silo Tower at Basel's Rhine harbor, the other half in the small church of Santa Maria Addolorata above Brissago in Ticino. The two locations also symbolize the musicians' origins: Marco von Orelli is from Basel, Sheldon Suter is from Ticino. Urbanity meets nature, industrialization meets spirituality.

In the attic of the silo, the duo uses the acoustics of the imposing space to underscore the swan song to a time when tangible machines instead of delicate electronics provided the soundtrack of everyday life. There, where Switzerland meets Germany and France in the border triangle (Dreiländereck), and where on the Rhine the shipping traffic between Basel and Rotterdam symbolizes the bustling activity of our capitalist society, there was eerie silence during the recordings. In 2020, the pandemic shut down the port.

In this extraordinary moment, Suter and von Orelli reveal themselves to be great adventurers and subtle melancholics: like archaeologists, they unearth long-lost voices from the depths of the silo and fuse them with their own individual and collective memories to create a requiem for the industrial wasteland.

As a result, wind instrument and percussion perform a dizzying pas de deux, upstream towards the source of the Rhine to high up in the Gotthard massif. In constantly new, sometimes monochrome, sometimes dazzlingly colored sound paintings, von Orelli and Suter prove how much they can shine both as individuals and as a collective: Two different characters - and yet connected by a deeply felt friendship.

With the crossing of the Alps, the aggregate state of their dialogue also changes. If at the beginning the sound first had to release itself from the depths of the brickwork, it continues to liquefy and in its final phase even flirts with gaseousness. The acoustics of the idyllically situated chapel away from the major urban centers transform the subtly woven conversation into a multi-layered manifesto, whose flight is gently held in check only by the roof of the church.

In its sum, "Draw from the source" recounts a multidimensional journey whose sources and paths constantly cross. Marco von Orelli and Sheldon Suter reveal a lot about themselves, about their individual idiosyncrasies and about their common feelings in this performance carried by finest lyricism. But behind this journey from the north to the south, from urban stagnation to Mediterranean lightness, there is also a call for us to reflect on the true nature of our existence in a changing world."-Rudolf Amstutz