GRID by Rent Romus

Modern music has followed a long tradition of filling up the spaces between so-called “sonic art” while still pulling from more traditional places like free jazz and contemporary classical music. Electronic music of the 20th century has always been labeled a “fringe-force” in contemporary culture, yet most other popular forms borrow from avant-garde electronic and musique concrete as well as industrialist traditions without paying any compliment to their origins. The music on this album was created remotely by both Rent Romus and Tobias Fischer in 2006…Somewhere between the worlds of free jazz and electronic music they must have made a pact to each forget where the other “came from” (not to meet one another half way between coasts) but to be independent of their influences enough to be fully in the tradition of both. It is a beautiful work of delicacy and shifting moods, wrong notes and lovely dissonances…this is a subtle work that requires quiet and solitude to unfold as both a complex and impassioned piece of sonic art that defines its own traditions.

Rent Romus hailed by Downbeat as having "a bold sound, unmistakable sincerity and conviction". A third generation Finnish American born in the great north of upper Michigan and growing up in the San Francisco Bay ,Romus' work on the saxophone has been dubbed “ferocious” by the San Francisco Weekly and “central to the creative music world of the West Coast” by writer jazz critic Frank Rubolino.

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