Mart Soo & Florian Walter Estonia-Germany

Mart Soo and Florian Walter met in 2015 in Wrocław and have been cooperating regularly since then. A documentation of their collaboration was recently released on their album The Golden And Other Ratios, recorded in Tallinn in 2019. While the title refers to architect and critic Michael Sorkin’s list of “250 Things An Architect Should Know”, the eight pieces on the album were created with the idea of an imaginary soundtrack for a retro-futuristic space western. The conceptual improvisation of Walter and Soo describes different stereotypes, atmospheres and stage sets, but leaves enough space in the listener’s head to fantasise the associated images themselves.

Mart Soo is an award-winning guitarist, pedagogue and composer who has been mainly involved in contemporary jazz, minimalism, world music, improvisational and experimental music. He studied at the Georg Ots Tallinn Music School and has been working there since 1990 as a teacher. Since 2005, Soo and Taavi Kerikmäe have been organising the improvisational music series ImproTest. Saxophone and clarinet player and composer of contemporary music, Florian Walter studied jazz-saxophone, composition and historical sciences in Essen, Germany. Playing in different ensembles in the fields of experimental pop music, modern jazz, improvisation, contemporary and theatre music, he seeks new ways to develop and construct sound without falling back onto traditional musical stereotypes. The hechtyphone is a newly developed hybrid between reed and brass instruments. It combines the features of multiple bells and two seperate piston machines, plus a slide system. If offers the possibilities of changing fluently between tempered and microtonal pitches and different mute constellations, while using the sound spectrum of reed instruments, making it a highly versatile and yet very distinctive instrument. One of its kind.