ACUTANCE brings together three outstanding musicians in a chamber ensemble at the crossroads of Free Jazz and the European avant-garde. Violist Laura Strobl, drummer Mark Sanders and pianist Georg Graewe combine musical maturity and precision with a restless curiosity and a remarkable intensity. Through the interplay of subtle sonic gestures, fragmentary melodies and abstract textures, they create music of striking clarity and structural coherence. Their approach is fundamentally collective: three distinct musical voices continually respond to and challenge one another, gradually forging a shared language.
The trio made its debut at London’s Cafe OTO in March 2026, as part of a three-day residency by Sanders. Their debut CD followed in July on Random Acoustics. Writing about the London concert on his blog Blue Moment, the acclaimed British journalist Richard Williams observed:
“It began as collective free improvisation sometimes does, with the feeling of waiting for something to happen. The three of them were playing at the same time, all busy enough, but with little apparent sense of connection. Then, however, that thing happened that can only happen with free improvisation. An entire music emerged. A real collective creation began to take shape, as if from nowhere (although not from nowhere, of course). Gradually the sounds they made together acquired proportion and a pulse, momentum and direction, an abstract narrative. A long crescendo was more than just a question of getting louder. A sudden halt was more than just a red light. Graewe’s scurries, Strobl’s scrapes and Sanders’ extraordinarily deft manipulation of a panoply of sound-making devices – gongs, bells and small cymbals as well as the regular trap set – fused into something living and breathing.”
Laura Strobl is a violist, composer and scholar. She studied viola at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, before completing a master’s degree in New Music at the University of Music Carl Maria von Weber Dresden and the Bern University of the Arts. As a freelance musician, she works across contemporary music and free improvisation. She has been a member of Georg Graewe’s Sonic Fiction Orchestra for many years and has collaborated with artists including Frank Gratkowski, François Houle, Gerry Hemingway, Isabelle Duthoit and Günter “Baby” Sommer. Her music-theatre work Umlaufende Absichten, for which she was responsible for the composition, performance, set design, costumes and direction, attracted considerable attention at the Tonlagen festival in Hellerau in 2021.
Georg Graewe (born in Bochum in 1956) is a pianist and composer. He began performing and composing professionally at the age of 15 and has since developed a distinctive musical language spanning free improvisation, contemporary composition and jazz. His work ranges from chamber and orchestral music to scores for film, theatre, radio drama and video. He has also composed operas for the Cologne Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Theater Luzern and Bonn Opera. Alongside his own ensembles, he has a long history of collaboration with musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Phil Minton and Roscoe Mitchell. Since 1989, he has played in a trio with Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger and American drummer Gerry Hemingway. Among his current projects is the ten-piece Sonic Fiction Orchestra.
Mark Sanders is a British drummer and percussionist of Belizean heritage. A prominent figure on the international free jazz and improvisation scene, he combines an expansive sonic vocabulary with rhythmic agility and a finely tuned sense of musical interplay. He works regularly with Evan Parker, John Butcher and Paul Dunmall, and has performed with artists including Roscoe Mitchell, Joëlle Léandre, Myra Melford and Wadada Leo Smith. His work also extends into contemporary music, music theatre and the visual arts, including collaborations with Christian Marclay and Elaine Mitchener. Sanders has appeared on more than 220 recordings. In 2024, he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.
