Acda

New York improvising guitarist Bill Frisell recording with Dutch/Belgian chanteuse Chantal Acda (Sleepingdog) at the 2017 Jazz Middelheim Fest, in Antwerp, Belgium, which they agreed to do based on mutual satisfaction of their collaboration on Acda's studio album "Bounce Back" that year, resulting in a wonderfully compatible concert of rich and beautiful music.

While Chantal's three previous solo albums were immaculately produced by two luminaries of the so-called "post-classical" scene (Nils Frahm, Peter Broderick and Phill Brown respectively), Saturday Moon is a more feral child and is all the stronger for it. The album spins and turns and upends preconceptions throughout its length. There are sonic surprises like Alan from Low's guitar synth on "Disappear," a song that ends in a tornado of electricity and also features backing vocals from Low bandmate Mimi. Atmospheric guitar legend Bill Frisell delicately converses with two tracks. Shahzad Ismaily of Tom Waits and Marc Ribot fame plays haunted six string fractures on one of the album's darkest songs "Conflict of Minds", together with Borgar Magnason (Sigur Rós, Björk). There are eighteen musicians in total on the album. Strings, horns, contrabass and piano are also woven into the kaleidoscopic, eclectic mesh. It is a human-all-too-human balance of things. Clarity and randomness. Anger and elation. Loss and awakening. The personal and the communal.

"PŪWAWAU is a musicperformance. Our world is changing so fast. We do seem to have lost contact with our own voices sometimes and stopped listening to others. Out of an urgency I wanted to research aspects of the singing and how we relate to this. How we connect and reflect. I truly believe it can bring us back to the rich world underneath the world of so many words with no meaning. It has always been my safe heaven and maybe it can be yours too."

“These are changing times: sad times but times that are also filled with hope. And I felt like this changing world required a different position from me, another way of relating to it. Working on this album helped me in the process.
I was searching for connections: with myself, with others and with something bigger than all of us. Soon I realised that writing an album in solitude – like I usually work – started to feel hypocritical, and that playing shows at venues with great PA systems and the perfect sound and lights couldn’t feel more different from how I normally write my music.