Civil Engineering Vol. 1 - feat. Carmen Quill & Qasim Naqvi (Pre-order)

• Improv colab album with ADAM SCHATZ (Landlady, Japanese Breakfast, Neko Case) on Saxophone, Piano, Loops, Treated Instruments; CARMEN QUILL (Scree) on Bass and QASIM NAQVI (Dawn of Midi) on drums recorded by SETH PARIS at the legendary Power Station in NYC.

• LIMITED PRESSING OF 100 COPIES

• INCLUDES DOWNLOAD WITH DIGITAL BONUS TRACK

I Think We've Got Something Here

On April 4th 2025, Seth Paris invited me to bring some musicians into the legendary Power Station studio as a test. Much of the younger Power Station staff needed a tutorial on using the Studer tape machine and as in house technical engineer it was on Seth to show them the ropes.

I smelled an easy excuse to make some spontaneous magic and quickly called bassist Carmen Quill (Scree), who I've beeing working with at a few duo performances over the past few years, and Qasim Naqvi (Dawn of Midi) as well, who gladly dragged his cymbals uptown but only had an hour to spare before his next engagement.

The whole premise was so unassuming that perhaps that's why the results are so concretely grand. I'd arrived early to setup and plug in devices, assemble my saxophone, affix a contact microphone onto the soundboard of the grand piano allowing me to delay, loop & manipulate the instrument in real time. Carmen arrived and we started making some initial noise for the demonstration Seth was leading behind the glass, and by the time Qasim walked in we were already improvising. He sat down and what happened next is what you hear on the record.

I never thought "I think we've got something here" until we listened back to the tape, twenty of us crammed into the control room. The tape was dumped into the computer and the sessions went on a hard drive you can fit in the pocket of your jeans and I mixed the recordings on my laptop while on tour with Japanese Breakfast the following month. Ancient and modern technologies shaking hands.

A similar handshake happens with improvisation. The waves of intention and risk and adventure that have been surfed by musical improvisation go back far, far, far, far, far in time. As modern bodies on a modern planet spinning in ancient space, we're constantly reckoning with what was and what could be. By actively improvising and meeting each other on that forgiving plane, we can peek into new vantages and obtain new perspectives. We can feel challenged and poised. We can feel dread. But we'll be damned if it isn't all felt in real time, ancient approaches adding extra calcium to our bones, future questions answering themselves with newer questions.

To me, a sentient work in progress, I feel that improvisation is such a damn gift. I'm grateful for Carmen & Qasim for their the willingness to expand out and dig down. There's nothing quite like taking a bunch of me's and making a big We. We pile on and shift. We reboot and rework. Here's what happened this one time. Thanks for joining us.

– Adam Schatz