Unearthing

Unearthing is the first recording by Swedish pianist Alex Zethson, French violinist Clara Levy and French tubaist Fanny Méteier. Released jointly by Thanatosis and Thödol, the album documents the trio’s first meeting — a meeting in which piano, violin and tuba become less fixed instruments than materials to be opened, disturbed and transformed. The music is improvised real-time composition, shaped by a set of directions from Zethson. Within this framework, the three musicians respond intuitively to one another, creating a distinct world through listening, friction and discovery. The result is not so much a collection of compositions as an excavation: sounds and forms gradually uncovered from within the instruments themselves.

The piano is approached largely from inside, its strings, wood, metal and mechanisms forming an extended field of percussion and resonance. Lévy’s prepared violin reveals grain, pressure, friction and bow noise, while Méteier’s tuba moves between monumental brass resonance and fragmented, breathy, percussive sounds. Wood, strings, brass, metal and air become equal protagonists.

Some pieces explore irregular rhythmic interplay, where pulses emerge and dissolve in unstable relationships. Others, particularly “Single Speed” and “Thoroughfare,” unfold as vast drone-like landscapes, with the piano played exclusively using e-bows. “Lull” inhabits a fragile, almost Feldmanesque space, while “Materialism” takes the album’s physical concerns somewhere stranger: Anton Toorell’s intuitive live mixing transforms the trio into something metallic, repetitive and uncanny, resembling a distant coin machine.

The album becomes a record of layered listening: three musicians discovering one another, Toorell responding to their traces, and the listener entering the process.

Unearthing is tactile yet elusive, intimate yet monumental — an excavation of sound where familiar instruments reveal unfamiliar bodies. It captures the unexpected magic of a first encounter.