Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Ignaz Schick come at improvised music with different tools but similar sensibilities. Hübsch, the veteran of the pair, is best known as a tubist, most recently on record in meetings with the likes of Phil Minton and Alexander von Schlippenbach. While Schick occasionally picks up a saxophone, he’s primarily a turntablist, turning out kinetic solo sets when he’s not collaborating with others on the Berlin scene.
Most of the new duo album, Iglu, was laid down at Hübsch’s studio in 2022. Both men restricted their usual range: The host stuck to vocals, and Schick used only a voltage-controlled sampler. For another, later session, they switched to tuba and turntables. Judging from the final result, that date wasn’t as fruitful: It primarily serves as a contrast to the voice-and-sampler improvisations.
Hübsch’s vocal range is the star of this show. We hear the full range of extended techniques–sighs, clicks, grunts, yelps–as well as genre imitations spanning from faux-opera to dark metal. A versatile vocalist might be the only type of performer than can fully keep up with Schick’s short attention span. The first two pieces on the album run 15 and 11 minutes, respectively, yet they could almost be sets of miniatures. There’s little long-form development, just barrages of ideas. Neither man has any problem keeping up.
Schick is most effective as a collaborator when his range is more limited, as it is here with the sampler. “Limited” is relative: Even without turntables, he produces everything from subtle background textures to percussive patterns to outright walls of sound.
The best moments on the record arrive when Hübsch and Schick reveal their shared sense of humor. Experimental musicians are sometimes hesitant to embrace it, but collective improvisation invariably generates funny moments. (When I saw Schick perform live a couple of years ago, he ended one piece unexpectedly and said, as if to himself, “This is ridiculous!”) Vocals lend themselves even more to humor: We start making silly sounds before we even learn to talk. Inducements to laughter are often cut out of studio sessions, but they survive the final edit here.
With that attitude prevailing, this studio recording has a live-on-stage vibe to it. For all the turntablists and improvising vocalists out there, no one else sounds quite like Schick or Hübsch. It seems inevitable that they would find each other. Now that they have, Iglu will surely mark the start of a longer collaboration.
