The project takes its inspiration from the ancient circle dance, exploring ideas of movement, repetition and transformation through collective improvisation. Mephisto and Mephista, the waggle motion of bees and different forms of dance all become starting points for a music in which expectations are taken up, twisted or abandoned. The result can be fragmentary or cohesive, absurd or familiar, with everything emerging from the interplay between the three musicians.

The trio’s approach balances clear musical frameworks with space for individual decisions and collective improvisation. They pull and stretch time through metric gymnastics, while angular riffs and melodies build tension before dissipating into sparseness. Fragile textures sit alongside denser, more forceful sections, with chaos and space held in balance. Complexity is used as a means of creating interaction rather than as an end in itself, with the music continually shifting between composition and improvisation.

The raw, intimate sound of three improvisers exploring together is central to the project. Brendle uses extended vocal techniques alongside melodic material, while Graupe’s guitar and Terzić’s drums and percussion respond to the shifting structures and rhythms in real time. The result is music that remains open to risk and unexpected turns without losing sight of the underlying composition.

Damaris Brendle was born in Bern and studied jazz and contemporary music at the Bern University of the Arts. She works across a range of ensembles, including Lina Tinérun, her duo with trombonist Florian Weiss, BUREAU BUREAU’s Goodbye Glacier, Florian Pfister’s big band and Ulysse Loup’s Large Ensemble. Ronny Graupe has been active on the German and international jazz scene since the mid-1990s, with more than a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader, and received the German Jazz Prize for guitar in 2021. Dejan Terzić, born in Banja Luka and raised in Nuremberg, has released 18 albums as a bandleader and contributed to more than 150 recordings as a sideman; he is also a professor at the Bern University of the Arts and a recipient of an ECHO Jazz Award for Best Drummer.