03 Dec 2026 ・ 20:00 ・ Club Wakuum
mayer + drab
Veronika Mayer: electronics
Gobi Drab: recorders, voice
mayer + drab move stylistically between free improvisation and new music. They create moving sound textures from instruments, voice and electronics. Their music takes on a lyrical character through the use of speech sounds and verbal rhythms and stands in the field of tension between tonal complement and tonal contrast through the duo’s instrumentation. The duo’s unconventional sounds, which are as fascinating as they are brittle, challenge the audience to question listening habits and engage with new sonic structures.
Website Veronika
Website Gobi
Bandcamp
mica interview
Vid Drašler & Samo Kutin
Nighttime. A dark silhouette introduces a mass softly meandering through the landscape and gently oozing through vegetation and objects. Initially, one can hear resistance to the motion which soon consolidates into a hazy impression of movement governed by a placid landscape. The tranquility is cut by a trotting drum, a startled heartbeat gallops through crackling branches while sporadic metallic clanks reveal a compound of derelict industrial constructions, barely shrouded by wild greenery.
As the wild clatter dissipates, we find ourselves prowling in a frog perspective. The five sonic images evoke weight, speed, might, demolition, and switching between linear and circular motion – between a series of subjective images, the concreteness of which fades out into the background of the omnipresent whirr of a monotonous, yet massive and passing progress. The scattered bangs of the acoustic body of an instrument or its collision with occasional objects sometimes evoke residual, human, metallic jangle. The simple contrast between a droning Kutin’s hurdy-gurdy, distinctively prepared, and Drašler’s racing and banging drums conjures up various modes of movement and, harnessing the song titles, natural imprints.
This is the first recording of the Samo Kutin and Vid Drašler duo. Avoiding the general assertions regarding the nature of bigger and smaller combos in improvised and exploratory music, Kutin’s shift from genre-based larger bands to sonic image weaving, predominantly in duos, is rather typical.
Kutin’s explorations of instruments originating from numerous geographical sources is usually referred to as folk- and world music (Horda grdih, Čarangi, Najoua with Ana Kravanja), which has been disproved by his recent ones (Bakalina velika, Širom) due to the originality of his approach. For a decade, he has also been present in more intimate settings as a soloist or in duos, mostly exploring and extending the sonicity of hurdy-gurdy with occasional addition of a wider range of instruments. In these situation, Kutin yanks his instruments from their respective histories, prepares them occasionally into idiosyncratic acoustic contraptions, and ventures into a dialogue with the specificities of the room or with the nature of the duo at hand. These features can be found in his solo projects The Vessel, and The Harps, and in duos with – yet again – Ana Kravanja, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Martin Küchen, Lee Patterson, and Pascal Battus.
For the last two decades, Vid Drašler has been active in almost every relevant music venue in Slovenia. He has never stopped returning to his native Bistrica ob Sotli, where the album in question was recorded. He studied with Zlatko Kaučič. In Ljubljana and Vrhnika, he has been a member of major freejazz bands. Among the trios with his brother Jošt, the TiTiTi might be the most prominent one. His larger combos are the Sunday Sexted and Oholo!. He is one of the most flexible and active Slovenian percussionists on the Ljubljana and Vrhnika improv scene, a member of several international improv combos (odbooqpo, collaborations with Tom Jackson and Andreas Røysum), while taking time for a hyperactive avant-garde rock trio Svojat. In some smaller combos, Drašler ventures beyond the exclusivity of music into poetry and painting (TiTiTi’s inspiration Jože Tisnikar) and sculpting (the project Barjanec in collaboration with Marko Jenič)
In the interplay with cryptic droning of the hurdy gurdy, percussions obtain an almost mystical, distinctively colourful, and spatial character. The drumming mostly reverberates acoustic qualities of sound objects while its rhythmical parts disentangle into relations that could be described either through the parameters of speed and motion or experienced through a set of personalized images. Naming the pieces positions them quite innocently in the context of a natural impression of sorts, but the abstractness of their sonic appearance also offers a more, let’s call it, cosmic experience. But not in the sense of order within a whole that would elicit pleasure, but rather in the sense of a palpable materiality of drone into which what couldn’t be established as order is dissolved.
