Free improvisation collective QUALM dive into free jazz, funk and spontaneous composition on their unpredictable debut album, Let’s Find Those Parrots In The Clouds.
QUALM have released their debut full-length Let’s Find Those Parrots In The Clouds, out today, October 23, through Zinnober Records.
Founded by Philipp Hager in 2020, QUALM operates less like a traditional band than an evolving collective. Different musicians and configurations have moved through the project, allowing its sound to remain deliberately open and capable of changing direction without warning.
For Let’s Find Those Parrots In The Clouds, Hager is joined on saxophone by Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein, with ZEMENT’s Christian Büdel on drums and DRNTTCKS’ Sebastian Dyrschka handling electric bass and synthesizers.
Together, the group draws from 1960s and ’70s free jazz, ’80s free funk, European improvisation and instant composition. Rather than carefully constructing the album piece by piece, QUALM recorded it during a single day of free improvisation.
That process produced four lengthy pieces built around the musicians responding to one another in real time. Saxophones twist around polyrhythmic percussion while bass and synthesizers provide a constantly shifting foundation. The music can move from explosive free-blowing into quieter passages before unexpectedly finding a groove and changing shape again.
Even the track titles reflect the playful looseness surrounding the project. The record opens with “If I had to choose, I'd rather be a regular zebra than some freakish horse” and continues with similarly winding names, including “A sudden qualm of sickness overcame us, while we were on a tub riding down to the river to find a place to dream.”
Recorded by Florian Helleken, edited and mixed by Hager and mastered by Maurice Schirm, Let’s Find Those Parrots In The Clouds captures QUALM as intended: unpredictable, collaborative and more interested in discovering where the music leads than forcing it toward a predetermined destination.