My 40 Favorite Albums of 2025, part 1

Tangent Mek, Immutable Traveler (Montaigne Noire)

French violinist Anouck Genthon, Greek flutist Marina Tantanozi, and Finnish viola de gamba player Anna-Kaisa Meklin are all based in Switzerland where they came together to form Tangent Mek, a trio of stunning versatility and lyric beauty. They toggle between folk material and contemporary music on Immutable Traveler, rejecting any notion of stylistic purity. Sometimes it reminds me of the folk explorations taken by Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker in their Canti di Guerra project, when they all sing lovely melodies, while elsewhere they conjure sonic worlds that the listener can inhabit, such “Say it Clear, Say it Loud,” where the layers of sustained tones generate a lush physical sensation, as one line or another seems to move across the foundation, suggesting a beguiling three-dimensionality.

The music of the trio tangent + mek is an open-ended sonic space. Dense or broken, the sound surfaces and structures are continuous, oscillating between noise, drone and traces of folk music material, that remain rather distant associations. Three well-known acoustic instruments heard in tonal proportions far removed from what one would expect. Since each musician brings in a rich spectrum of tonal differentiation, there are many possible combinations. Gently but surely the three lead the listener into the interior of the sounds. Their music includes shaped chamber-musical structures, and silence is always an option.

The Baars/Kneer/Elgart trio exists in this form since 2010, formed during a festival encounter in Amsterdam’s Bimhuis of the back then Amsterdam-based Baars/Kneer duo with Ulm based drummer Bill Elgart; the duo became a trio as a matter of course. Since then it has toured regularly in European clubs and appeared at festivals such as the Nickelsdorfer Konfrontationen and the Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon. In the meantime, 3 recordings have been released on the labels Evil Rabbit Records and Jazzwerkstatt, which caused a sensation internationally.