Comprising four highly sought after modern musicians from Athens and Amsterdam, the group is led by guitarist Michalis Tsiftsis and bassist Yiannis Vagianos. 

First meeting at the Franco Ambrosetti Jazz Awards in 2022 – where the pair won the first and second prize – the duo felt an instant musical kinship and decided to form a collaborative ensemble. Pooling their influences and compositional voices together, their joint quartet’s sound fuses modern jazz dynamism and ferocity with a contemporary pensive ambience. 

With the dense yet delicate textures of the piano and guitar taking centre stage, lyrical folk-tinged melodies, complex grooves irregular in metre and phrasing and colourful harmony come together to form the rousing, live sound of the quartet. Each thoughtfully crafted intricacy of the writing is interpreted with personality and flair, before evolving into extended passages of imaginative improvisation from all four corners of the ensemble.

Featuring eight original compositions, each piece on the record serves as a musical reflection of a place, idea, or personal story that preoccupy the duo’s minds. ‘Dream Machine’ is named after Sommerville & Gysin’s stroboscopic hypnotisation device which uses light patterns to relax the brain, ‘Fundamental’ was inspired by the minimalist musical works of Nik Baertsch, as well as the inequality in Western abundance at the expense of the ‘Global South’, and ‘Sketch’ is a metaphor for the reality of the modern musician who often has a very limited amount of time to create something with artistic value.