Liner Notes

Takeoff: the moment you no longer touch the ground, when your breath deepens and your gaze opens outward. A balloon, perhaps, rising over the meadows and fields; the perspective shifts to the view from above –
From the first notes of this album, a sensation of soaring, of floating sets in. The Fünf are in their fifth year now, self-assured pilots of their own flying machine – a “mobile” that transports us to magical places, imaginary places, a journey through the looking glass and beyond…or take a different image: a flowing river. It absorbs water from smaller streams, changes them (changing itself in the process); it rises and falls, ever-changing but still the same river –
The music of Sebastian Simsa and “his” Five conjures poetical images and resists purely technical description – though that can be, and has been, done elsewhere: reference has been made to folk influences, chamber-musical elements, the jazz idiom. Still, analysis fails to capture the essence of this music, the way it effortlessly defies the gravitational pull of fixed certainties (call them styles, call them genres). Music with no fear of beauty; music that is light, but never shallow; music that manages to be simultaneously powerful and relaxed. May this Perpetuum Mobile carry us ever further, never stopping…

Johann Kneihs / April 2022