Enders Room - Hotel Alba

Weilheim ist the Place!,

Forget Krautrock and watch out for the possibly most cutting-edge music scene in Germany today: Weilheim, a really totally boring small city in the south of Munich. But surely you’ve heard from acts like The Notwist, Lali Puna, Couch, Console a.m.o. which are all calling Weilheim their hometown. To this circle of friends belongs as a key figure saxophone player Johannes Enders. He played on several records of The Notwist, he is a member of the exciting jazz `n dub collective Tied & Tickled Trio and since 2002 he runs his own project Enders Room.  Tuition is happy to announce the release of the third record of Enders Room: Welcome to the Hotel Alba!

To make your stay in this hospitable sound world as pleasant as possible, we ask you to listen closely for the next fifty-six minutes and forty-nine seconds. Relax in the casual “Luna Park” or in the hopeful thought “When Love Is New Daily.” Celebrate in “Tiki Land” or on an exciting trip on the “Alien Railroad” into visions of the future from the 1980s. Revel in “Morph” (1 and 2), get goose bumps in “El All” or admire “The Final Hippie.” Go slowly and approach it slowly, for, as your host Johannes Enders says: “The first impressions are the strongest.” In Enders Room, “this stylistically assured border crosser” brings together “the DJ aesthetic, electronic music, and improvised fragments of tradition” (Musikexpress), his individual and inspired sounds are influenced by Steve Reich, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, and Weather Report and by his experience performing with The Notwist, Billy Hart, Roy Hargrove, Marsmobil, and fauna flash. Hotel Alba is the remarkable third, entirely new album in this electro-authentic playing style, still “gently avant-garde” (Die Zeit), “nonconformist and good” (Stereoplay), and yet like “vanilla ice cream with hot raspberry sauce, though nowhere near that sweet” (Die Welt). With ten of his most intimate musical partners, including Roberto di Gioia and Sebastian Studnitzky, the leader demonstrates once again on this album that he not only writes beautiful songs and plays fantastic melodies and harmonies—having mastered all the available saxophones and flutes, the Fender Rhodes, Philicorda, and a piano, on bass clarinet, guitar, and his computer—but can also sing. That shows both character and charm, casting an even more intimate and extreme spell on listeners in this music. The highs and lows, the tension and relaxation that these twelve tracks produce span a large arc and hit the target. And that, as always, is the way.