Vynil version 12″ and digital download version – from March 23 2020
Catalytic Sound

Buy here
https://vandermark1.bandcamp.com/album/open-border

Rewiews of the concert

….Pagan and cultured music hand in hand in the hyperuranium, dense and tense silences, stalking, escapes, ambushes, clearings, archaic and forbidden fantasies, lux aeterna, drums live elaborated by Ceccarelli, who turns out to be the real wizard of the quartet, his crucial role in refracting in bottomless pits and making the acoustic rain of the other three abstract or hyperreal…. [complete rewiew (in Italian)]

Nazim Comunale, The New Noise (18.10.18)

The light game of sounds at Forlì Open Music

…. We go to this festival in search of the unique sound in the making of the non-pop universe. Forms-non-forms that can overcome belonging to genres, traditions, schools and circulate a common platform of musical contemporaneity that is constantly open …..
In any case, this is the acute cultural proposal of Area Sismica on the occasion of Forlì Open Music ……
Luigi Ceccarelli, a well-known composer in the non-observant “contemporary” world, and Gianni Trovalusci, a globalist flutist, are part of the “learned” world, Ken Vandermark and Hamid Drake (toh, who sees himself!) Are part of the jazz world.

Together they form the Open Border group.
……..Vandermark renounces modern jazz and adopts the “neurotic” melody (obviously a positive term) of the more or less historical avant-garde. Drake uses his infinite percussive wisdom for the same purpose. Trovalusci with pipes of various sizes emits fascinating puffs and single sounds. Ceccarelli with computer and tablet captures the sounds of others and sends them reworked into the common space where they become new material. Radical contemporary music and radical free improvisation. The two are the same….

Mario Gamba, Il Manifesto 16.10.2018

Forlì open music (Really)

But Forlì Open Music aims high not only approaches distant sound worlds but wants to mix them. Open Border is the final event, an original project that sees the reeds of Vandermark and the percussion of Drake, two jazz players in dialogue with absolute protagonists of Italian contemporary such as Luigi Ceccarelli on electronics and Gianni Trovalusci on flutes. A largely successful meeting when the musicians looked for possible meeting points, giving up part of their baggage to get closer to each other. Vandermark rediscovers his most radical language made up of rips, Drake limits the ethnic aspect and develops isolated sounds. Trovalusci’s flutes and sound tubes alternate ancestral charms with contemporary visions, Ceccarelli’s electronics have the merit of managing, expanding, relaunching all the materials brought into play with a remarkable sense of form. The short encore opens with Drake’s shamanic voice that stimulates a phrase with the sweet flavor of a sax mantra immediately flanked by flutes. It couldn’t have been a better ending… (complete rewiev [in italian]) .

Paolo Carradori, Il Giornale della Musica – Oct 13, 2018

What impresses me most is that, unlike many other electronic musicians, Ceccarelli’s playing has the distinct ability to “breathe” just as much as his fellow artist’s acoustic instruments. The music seems to float, mingle, seperate, and then join again as a beautiful tapestry of sound is produced. Mesmerizing!!! 😎
Rick Mathis

How to open the curtain on a sidereal abyss: Open Border, an open border, worlds that we don’t know yet and are familiar and that we return to visit with great joy in listening …

This stellar quartet, assembled by Ariele Monti (deus ex machina of the Forlì club [Seismic Area]), closed the edition two years ago with a thrilling live which now (edited) becomes a 12 “vinyl (and download) for Ken Vandermark’s Audiographic Records, which produces the work together with Ariele Monti and Area Seismica. What we listened live and we hear now on lp was the tasty and forbidden fruit of the first ever encounter between these heavyweights: Ken Vandermark on saxophones and Hamid Drake on drums to guard the avant-jazz side of the territory, Gianni Trovalusci on flutes and sound pipes (at dinner then on the evening of the concert he would have told me that they were the pipes of a tent … when the genius is said) to probe the land of the contemporary and Luigi Ceccarelli, who turns out to be the real sorcerer, to process the sound of the other three live, adding scientific delirium to delirium, bright confusion to confusion. Pagan music and cultured arm in arm in Hyperuranium, dense and tense silences, stalking, escapes, ambushes, clearings, archaic and forbidden fantasies, lux aeterna, drums.

Thanks to Ceccarelli’s abstract and punctual electronics, the sound is refracted in bottomless wells; the acoustic rain of tenor, flute and percussion becomes hyperreal, a filigree dream.

The climate sometimes resembles a more shaggy Threadgill, then there are explosions like in Coltrane’s Interstellar Regions, with live electronics adding quarters of strangeness and impregnability, but every reference is in vain because the music we listen to is truly new and unheard of, creepy. Trovalusci at the sound pipes is a shaman in the academy, the tenor sax turns into a cello, it is the sound of a perennial metamorphosis, a free chrysalis that take off as a contemporary butterfly. The clear feeling is that this is an important musical encounter, the seed of a forbidden and tasty fruit, which no God will be able to prevent us from tasting. A sincere praise therefore to those who thought of bringing these musicians together in space, allowing us to sail with them. At times the ears imagine the music of the pygmies played by Stockhausen, the heart listens to ancient and brand new speeches, elusive secrets, the eyes are dazzled by so much monolithic, kaleidoscopic clarity.

This music creates (and needs) space: a long theory of vanishing points, a cold that tastes of galaxy, cosmic wind, black holes, delicate and powerful epiphanies, sounds in constant movement, pregnant with questions, vague and storytellers yet steadfast in their drift, philosophical and orgiastic, unstoppable, fluid, natural as a breath. Music that seems the transcription in score of a Nietzsche book, ruthless and bloody human. Thirty-five minutes simply amazing.

Nazim Comunale – The New Noise 11/04/2020

If you think of Benedetto Croce who did not accept the distinction of forms of art and literary genres, stating that the intuitions are infinite and cannot be cataloged in classes because “organically connected as different and necessary stages in the development of the Spirit”, we are not surprised if in today’s jumble and in the diversity of musical proposals, languages ​​and poetic instances it happens that different languages ​​can find perfect harmony by joining in the construction of unpublished works with cohesive unity of forms and contents. This is the case of “Open Border” which testifies to the 2018 concert for the Forlì Open Music organized by Area Sismica, a performance by a quartet made up of some of the most eminent experimental musicians in activity: on the one hand the jazz players Ken Vandermark (tenor sax clarinet) and Hamid Drake (drums and percussion) and on the other the exponents of contemporary learned music

Luigi Ceccarelli (electronics) and Gianni Trovalusci (flutes). The disc goes beyond the transitory phase identified at the beginning of the 20th century by the musicologist Giannotto Bastianelli, who, following up Niccian intuitions, saw the passionate followers of the god Dionysos opposing the cerebral ones of the god Hermes to arrive at a desired mediation of more advanced and complete synthesis. Thus, letting oneself go to a total improvisation (apart from a few fleeting predetermined junctions), the music unfolds through sudden ingenious shrewdness, murmurs, suspensions, melopees, drones, flashes of abstraction, clots of heavy matter, periods of punctual noise , with Vandermark reminiscent of Pharoah Sanders and Roscoe Mitchell and Trovalusci il Gazzelloni di Maderna, while Ceccarelli and Drake sew, open and close the shirts with sartorial skill. They are only thirty-five minutes of a single piece, a condensation of biting beauty.

Aldo Gianolio, Audio Review n.420 may-June 2020