New CD

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What the press has to say:

Ignaz Schick and drummer Ernst Bier reunite for Hawking, having performed as a duo for nearly a decade. This session, recorded in 2018, adds Gunnar Geisse on laptop guitar plus virtual instruments. The trio switches between an acoustic and electric attack, favoring neither over the other option. That simply keeps the attention focused on their innovative efforts. "Neither Picture nor Frame" and "System of Units" follow roistering inebriated paths with Schick's squawking alto saxophone tripping over cascading drums and (virtual?) piano. In contrast "No Boundary Proposal" is a cinematic, electric field recording, akin to a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack to a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Bier, Geisse, and Schick combine the electric with the acoustic "Laws Of Form" where self-propelled machine sounds are fueled by busy beats making an insect colony of sound. The creative mix is the focus with the trio never satisfied with one style or direction track to track. 

Mark Corroto , AllAboutJazz 11. März 2024

Experimental music album from Germany, recorded with Ernst Bier on drums and Ignaz Schick on saxophone from Berlin, and Gunnar Geisse, guitarist and electronic musician from Munich. Ignaz Schick is a saxophonist who studied with Don Cherry and is also an experimental musician who plays with turntables and electronics. The album is an album of shocking electronic music, in which the acoustic sounds of saxophone, guitar and drums in electronic instruments such as wave drums, electronics, turntables etc. electronic drums, electronics, turntables, etc., creating an intoxicating electronic is created. It's like an acoustic science fiction movie that cannot be cannot be described in words.

Masayuki Koito, The Walker's Vol.75, Page 13 Japan

Hawking Extended is a recent(ish) ten-track album from highly creative German Turntablist & saxophonist Ignaz Schick. For the album, he’s joined by two other names from the German jazz/ improv scene, guitarist Gunnar Geisse & drummer Ernst Bier. And boy it’s another dense, darting, and often deranged release that I guess is grounded in jazz/ improv- but it really goes way more places. The CD comes presented in a simple- yet -impactful three-panel card sleeve- this takes in white texts set against a bright orange backdrop. The album is released on Schick’s own Zarek label, and can be purchased directly from here. The album was jointly composed/ improvised by the three- been recorded over two days in May of 2018, all in real time with no overdubs. The lineup was- Ignaz Schick -alto saxophone, turntables, sampler. Gunnar Geisse- laptop guitar, virtual instruments, and Ernst Bier -drums, wave drum, electronics. Things kick off with “Flat Earth” which brings together wailing & haunting Eastern chants, tip-tap to ringing & cascading percussion, dartingly angular piano keys, and smoky to fiery horn playing. By track four “Music With The Letter X” we find a mixture of brooding ‘n’ dramatic soundtrack flow- edged with wavering ‘n’ watery percussion, passioned horn playing, and abstract midi textures. Moving into the second half of the album we get mangled ‘n’ bopping “Neither Picture Nor Frame” with its cut-up piano keys layers coming in at all angles & manic horn weaves- making for a track that is both wonderful chaotic & cheekily playful too. We have “The Darkening” which starts off low key- with off-beat percussion ‘n’ bass pulse- with the horn and secondary bass fumbles work slowly drifting into. With slurred warbling electronics and distant speed-up turntable elements just heard. The album plays out with “System Of Units” which is all smashing ‘n’ crashing percussion, wayward to piping horn work, mangled electro muzak, and spinning-to-buzzing electronic sub-tone detail. Hawking Extended truly is a wonderfully manic and often totally overwhelming experience. Yet through all the layers & chaos, there is always rewarding detail to be mined & found, which makes it such a pleasure to revisit again & again.

Roger Batty, Musique Machine 18.11.2023, Stars: 4 of 5

                                                                             The New York City Jazz Record Dez. 2023

Drones, dark humming caverns, flashes of saxophone, drums and (laptop) guitar twitch up, dance ecstatically on looped ground, whip each other forward. Three excessively energy-squandering free players organize the literal sound storm and improvisationally lay layer upon layer, rhythmically fed by sample sequences and Ernst Bier's indulgent drumming. Clear assignments of sound to instrument emerge only in parts - Geisse's digitized guitar as a sample gun. Schick on prepared turntables and samplers as well as Bier with electronics of whatever kind drive a colorful game with orchestral snippets, sounds from real life and soloistic dramaturgical continuation especially by the alto saxophone. Drama, baby! We're whisked away into ominous atmospheres, ducking laser cannons and stumbling over drum 'n' bass artifacts scared away by swarms of violins on coke. It bubbles, quakes, bubbles, unexpected energy sources solve the heating problem of the coming winter. This becomes symphonic ("No Boundary Proposal"), only to be replaced by an edgy jazz improv somewhere just below the cloud on which Ornette and Ayler are sitting ("Neither Picture nor Frame").

Improvisations rush in that sound more like three instruments and yet not, when Gunnar Geisse spins many different instruments through the digi-meat grinder. Wonderful! Then again pure electronic spectrum mountains, short, violent ("The Truth Function"), followed by introspective kneading of melancholic sensitivities. And again Schick`s alto saxophone in slightly unruly lament mode over noisy pinpricks from sample strumming, to drum mantras, jazz: way ahead here. The future is now, so to speak.

Werner Siebert Jazz Podium 10 -11.2023

Hawking Extended brings together Schick, on alto sax, turntables and sampler, with fellow Berliner jazz drummer Ernst Bier, who played with Schick in the Hawing duo since 2013, and here adds wave drums and electronics, with Munich-based guitarist and live-electronics player Gunnar Geisse, who plays on laptop guitar and virtual instruments. This trio was recorded at Bonello Studio Berlin in May 2018, a year after the first concert of the trio. These idiosyncratic musicians mirror and are being fed by the tension of their acoustic setting of alto sax, electric laptop guitar and drums, with the electronic and processed layers of wave drums, laptop and turntables. This unique setting forces Schick, Bier and Geisse to take risks, dive deep into unpredictable and cryptic interplay, and sketch highly eclectic and obscure sonic textures, collages and collisions that occasionally touch taboo kitsch or alien kind of cartoon music and flirt with anything from poetic and cathartic free jazz to Sci-Fi cinematic-nightmarish atmospherics. One of the pieces is titled “No Boundary Proposal” and this title captures the essence Hawking Extended weird, provocative but totally captivating, as well as the aesthetics of Schick’s work.

Eyal Hareuveni, The Free Jazz Collective, September 29, 2023

For the drummer ERNST BIER speak e.g. "Helter Skelter - Beatles Forever" with Joe Sachse, "Grasgeflüster" as DrumBone with Günter Heinz, his playing in the Perry Robinson Trio. Born 1951 an old hand, he forms with IGNAZ SCHICK the live-electronic duo Hawking. With GUNNAR GEISSE and his laptop guitar, well known through München Neus and the MUC_ChamberArtTrio with Udo Schindler, the result was Hawking Extended (ZAREK23) recorded in May 2018 at Bonello Studio Berlin. In electro-acoustic harmony of drums, wave drums & electronics, guitar & virtual instruments, turntables, sampler & alto sax. Self-ironically they mock the freedom they take with 'Music with the Letter X' and 'NeitherPicture nor Frame'. They take the 'Laws of Form' as they find them. Schick plays jazz, but where does the strange ethno vocals come from? The sampler has a virtual accomplice here, so

that apart from the bier is bier and sax is sax a lot of things ghost around each other and swim through each other, stuttering disrupted and purring droned, in love with noise of any color. Bier also collects scrapping premiums, sonically there is massive on the nut, with rough fire spitting, molecularly moving orchestrality, digital and on wire.

I like it when Geisse shakes his white mane of tinsel over the entire scale width. As a short history of time in 64 diversified minutes, creation is blown around your ears almost from nowhere, in string orchestra shreds, as vinyl noise in scribbled loops, as groove from another star. As fast-paced jazz with phantom piano scratched as if by Kater Murr, the rhythms crooked and crooked. Sample voices that mock sense and reason are slashed and unmasked as trollish. The fact that so many neverthelesslet themselves be babbled stupidly, makes gloomy and

it's to go nuts ('The Darkening'). Nevertheless they don't plead for Law & Order, but splash, dabble, circumvent law with cunning, whimsy, liberté. And they jazz again with a high deflection on Ornette Coleman's Prime Time scale.

Rigobert Dittmann / Bad Alchemy Magazin  [BA 120 rbd]

It was in 2009 when I met Ignaz Schick, a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist from Berlin, who at that time also worked at the legendary Staalplaat store, and who I had the chance to play in Lugano on a great evening together with Andrea Belfi and Manuel Mota. He is also a discographer for the Zarek label and Zangi Studios, and in these first days of July he is back with three new releases. So, without getting lost in chatter, let's start with Hawking Extended, the continuation of a duo founded in 2013 with percussionist Ernst Bier, enriched in this session by the presence of Gunnar Geisse on laptop guitar and virtual instruments. Also active with Zarek Brands and Zangi Studios, he is these days with Pomp and with three new releases in these first days of July. So, let's start without losing ourselves in verbiage, with this Hawking Extended, the continuation of a duo created in 2013 with percussionist Ernst Bier and in this in this session by the presence of Gunnar Geisse, on laptop guitar and virtual instruments.

The authors of the first trio concert in 2017, they meet again in the studio a year later to create a tension between acoustic and electronic instrumentation, then forcing unifications between the syncopated idioms of both instruments. It is easier to hear than to describe, with a mixture of free jazz, concrete music, and leaden mantles

of sound that promise storms. At times Ernst Bier seems like the captain of a ship in a storm, with shattered scales and moody drone and puff. On this ship, one can imagine a stage adorned with brocade curtains literally falling apart as the band plays on while everything goes down: the Titanic's orchestra doesn't seem far away, given the fleeting elegiac tone of The Large Scale's finale. The trio's music is in a constant state of imbalance, chases itself dynamically and undulates, bringing with it the ability to tell us oppressive, dramatic, vivid images through sound. In No Boundary Proposal, the electronics are more noticeable, almost as if a contemporary filter had been placed on a daring score of concrete music from the late 1940s. Pulsing, rippling, grinding, sirens in the distance, worlds colliding between different eras. The trio's journey also presents different scenarios, while maintaining the basic roughness: There are softer, more musical tracks like Neither Picture No Frame and other, more insistent tracks that almost tend to scare, like The Truth Function, which finds no rest and echoes between its circulatory bends and beguiling, harassing spikes. A The Darkening cool jazz that almost seems like a contrast, so open and soulful. But the battle is not over and will not end, amid contrasting rhythms so rich that they flicker between one ear and the other until they leave us pleasantly invigorated.

Sodapop, Vasco Viviani 09/2023

Ever been woken up by the buzzing of a wasp or, even worse, by the buzzing of a mosquito? Ignaz Schick, Gunnar Geisse and Ernst Bier make the nightmares (yes, the reviewer suffers exactly from those described) come true. And this already at the beginning with the first notes. Flat Earth is the name of the piece, and if the earth were really flat, the scenario would probably be even more threatening. Where to go with his fears? Stephen Hawking is the godfather for this bubbling brew of soundscapes, noise scraps and free jazz attacks. A mixture that definitely seems orchestral and can't deny the will to bombast. The Large Scale is the best example for this. A wall of sound opens up, driving drums and a lot of fuss in a positive sense. Saxophone notes from Schick himself, once melodic, then splitting, cut through the chaos before it dissolves into a menacing underlying hum. Ligeti would probably have had a field day with it. And best of all: it goes on and on. But who is the conductor of this "System of Units"? And: Does he have a master plan? As is well known, Hawking has asked mankind to leave the earth within the next hundred years. But before that one should listen to a lot of music, this one for example. Who knows if there will be space and time for it elsewhere.

Holger Pauler, freiStil – Magazin für Musik und Umgebung Oct. 2023

Collapsing sound constructions

Ernst Bier, Ignaz Schick and Gunnar Geisse let their improvisations jump, make noise, fade away, made sound exploration machines out of their instruments - an extraordinary concert at Cafe Ton in Fabrikschleichach.

As "Hawking Extended" Ernst Bier, Ignaz Schick and Gunnar Geisse let listening habits explode. Their free improvisations do not follow any fashion trend, they create their own language - grandiose. Admittedly, free improvisation is not everyone's cup of tea, but those who tolerate, even love, free sound structures will experience with "Hawking Extended" a trio that pushes the limits with relish. A triumvirate in which each individual unfolds his instrumental identity.

Own tonal language

Ernst Bier, Ignaz Schick and Gunnar Geisse reveal a completely new tonal language, completely new structures, just not subject to any fashion, authentic, obstinate, detail-loving, hard-edged."Hawking Extended" interweaves, floats harmoniously, all seemingly oblivious and yet so completely there in their selves. They paint their dystopia

of the world, soaring into a cacophony of sound, creating an orchestral cinematic space for thoughts and images.

With such jazz one does not recover, such jazz improvisations are made for those who are awake and want to

stay awake. The sound structures describe anger, war, wildness, diversity, maybe just our everyday life, our

social reality and they give a hint of vision, science fiction, not fashionable and entertaining: different.

Brigitte Krause - Donnerstag 4. August 2022 Fränkischer Tag