a book of waves – album

Andy Graydon
Klaus Janek

a book of waves

release date June 2025 on Room40 label

Writing on the water

After playing together for years, our tide was turning. What began as a happy rhythm of show dates in Berlin, from cozy trios in Klaus’ home studio to ten-piece ensembles at Ausland, was now ebbing away thanks to Andy’s move to the US. Whenever an accustomed pattern shifts it can take time to readjust, to find the gravity that will pull to shape an orbit again. What had been working well between us remained on both our minds for a few years after: the tension between complimentary forms and reflexes—from deep bass to airy hiss, from swift improvised gesture to slowly developing layer—these still animated our imaginations. But they had been honed in live playing, a situation now vanishingly rare. Then Klaus simply suggested we work toward a record, in gradual steps, no pressure, by trading recordings and responding to them in turn. This would be a conversation in concrete sound objects as opposed to the intuitive communication and reciprocal flow of on-stage collaboration. A different listening, becoming a different sounding.

Again we found seemingly opposing tendencies resonating to surprising effect in the long-distance, long-term recording and exchange process. A new productive tension was added to our process: between the excitatory becoming of live playing and the carving directly in fixed blocks of sound that felt more like writing than performing. We took our time, savored the eddies and deluges, gaps and jumps of building a work together asynchronously. Around the time we were working on the last track of this collection, Andy pored over Stefan Helreich’s A Book of Waves, a brilliant exploration of the ocean wave in its many forms and meanings across science and cultures, from histories to technologies to ecologies. In both the title’s turn of phrase and the depths it plumbed, we felt we had found an echo of our cyclical endeavor, circumnavigating an idea, a shadow of which we can finally share in the shape of this record.