Nissen Mosh is the latest project from Danish-born, Berlin-based saxophonist Asger Nissen. The quartet, composed of fellow emerging Berlin artists and long-time collaborators Thorbjørn Stefansson (bass), Marius Wankel (drums), and Valentin Gerhardus (piano), tackles Nissen’s original, highly-structured improvised music with a
telepathic charge. The group’s debut album, “Precious” (released on ENJA Records March 2023), is a collection of pieces that draw formal influence from Modern Jazz, the contemporary German avant-garde, and early New Music, and in more subconscious ways, from popular
genres like rap and R&B. Nissen compresses grooves into textures and motifs, conceals songs within songs, and weights his melodies not on a tonic, but a cluster of tonalities.
He is brimming with ideas. The band fills them out, finds their edges. They practice meticulously. The result is a unified, live- wire sound: Stefansson and Wankel lay a heavy foundation, and Gerhardus’ piano voicings crack open the melodic possibilities for Nissen’s alto like light through a prism.Both on stage and on record the group is fierce and exacting, but never prone to flights of ego. Instead, they move deftly over the shifting rhythms under their feet,
darkening, brightening, fluttering apart, then rushing back together, tight as a valve seal.
What’s hiding under all that complexity? There’s pleasure in dwelling on that riddle for a while. The visceral feel of the music, for a listener, lies in the work it takes to make it—that sweating effort to focus—to listen. The track titles, too, usually free- associated and often very funny, add a poetic dimension to the sound. “Yoga” is a hair’s
breadth away from chaos; “Roger That,” a tribute to Nissen’s friend and collaborator Roger Kintopf, babbles like a lunatic voice over the radio. And the band can be quick to tenderness in surprising places. Nissen can play in a whisper; Stefansson plucks even barbed, atonal lines with warmth and resonance. In “Heimat Dusk,” the record’s second-to-last track, the melody rises, deepens, and fades on the breath, gently supported by Gerhardus’ sparse chords and Wankel’s shimmer cymbal. It was written as an ode to Nissen’s coastal hometown of Elsinore, whose familiarity he came to appreciate with a
new depth of feeling after moving away. It is a moment of balance in an otherwise spectacularly frenetic record. Indeed, sometimes sincerity is that simple; other times, it emerges in roundabout ways.