Additional information
Personnel: Günter Sommer (drums, percussion, gong). Liner Note Author: Hans-Jürgen Linke. Recording information: East Berlin (09/1988); Zurich, Switzerland (09/1988). Master percussionist Günter Sommer is a drummer with a method to his solo madness. Here, through 13 compositions -- one of them a four-part suite -- Sommer plays a trap kit, gongs, bandoneon, darabuka, mundharmonika, schlamei, and other instruments, and creates a series of panoramic beat sketches that are airy, fluid, and compelling. Sommer is a storyteller in rhythm. He chatters, moans, spits, songs, and hollers in meter. He invents and reinvents his drum lines as he travels through one sequence after another adding and subtracting, creating ever-moving patterns of organic pulse. There are no showboaty pyrotechnics on this disc; everything is a song, each construction has a beginning, a middle, and an end in a very narrative sense. In fact, though Sommer is closely affiliated with the free-music improvising artists of Western Europe, this disc couldn't be anything further from that if it tried. As a result, it is one of the most listenable and delightful solo percussion records to be issued from that scene in quite a while. ~ Thom Jurek
