THERMAL
© Joe Strobel - Parthenay, France 2004
John Butcher - Thomas Lehn - Andy Moor
cd
Thermal
read
Paris Transatlantic
visit
Andy Moor at
the EX
During the '90s Andy Moor and John Butcher met at various festivals where the EX were playing. The opportunity to work together came in 2000 when synthesizer player Thomas Lehn joined them for a trio in Brussels.
Festival performances by the trio have included Victoriaville, Ulrichsberg, Parthenay, Mulhouse and Vandoeuvre.
Butcher has also played with Moor in the EX Orchestra and in 2003 with Kaffe Matthews at the Wire's Adventures in Modern Music festival in Chicago, and the Austin CinemaTexas festival.
It looks like the trio was created by a computer, such is the perfect disposition of sounds, minds and absolute respect for one another that the three players brought to the table. Andy Moor has his strings going from a rusty scrape to an ethereal drone of adjacent tones, going into territories near to "Branca/Chatham/Moore & Ranaldo" school, while Lehn gets incredibly various manifestations from his analogue EMS synthesizer, resulting maybe in the most creative synthetist in recent and not so recent years; Thomas literally puts to shame the ones who use Oberheims and Wavestations for a single low note (the so called "Dark Ambient Syndrome"). But something must be said for many sax players, because after they'll experience John Butcher's talent, his multiphonic control, his dynamics domination, the beauty of his "regular" tone - well, they won't be missed when they'll finally put their instrument away, together with their dusty "Real Books".
Massimo Ricci - Touching Extremes
Thermal
Recorded at Studio 1, Overtone, Amsterdam