Weather, Not Genre: äbädä’s Unclassifiable Weather

Six improvised tracks for piano, voice, and objects. 35:06, quadraphonic.

From the “Small Storm for Piano and Mouth” video. Visuals by Eda Er.

Some duos chase a sound. äbädä — the pianist Simon Sieger and the composer-vocalist Eda Er — chase a climate. Unclassifiable Weather, their second album, is six improvised tracks that behave less like songs than like passing weather systems: pressure builds and releases, lyric fragments drift in like warm air, noise gathers and storms, and then the sky clears. The title is the thesis. This isn’t a fusion of genres; it’s a weather in which genres appear for a moment — a snatch of song, a percussive squall, a chamber gesture — and are gone before you can name them.

It’s the follow-up to the duo’s debut, Marseille 2019, and it represents a real refinement. Where the first album cut between ideas with sharp, Fluxus-like edits, this one moves in smooth arcs. Each track is shaped as a single continuous weather event — a density curve that swells and recedes — rather than a series of interruptions. The result is more patient, more enveloping, and, frankly, more beautiful.

How two people make one sky

The making of it is unusual and worth knowing, because you can hear it. Sieger (piano) and Er (voice, kalimba, electronics, and objects) improvised in parallel, their performances captured as sample-locked stems and then mixed into a four-channel quadraphonic space. In that space the two performers rotate — Er clockwise, Sieger counter-clockwise, at different speeds in every track — so the music is constantly turning around the listener like a slow front moving through. Crucially, neither is ever fully absent from any direction; the piano and the voice are always present somewhere in the room, only ever emphasized one way or another. Even folded down to stereo, that rotation survives as a gentle, perpetual drift.

Holding it all together is an A-minor tonal centre that runs the length of the album as soft, piano-like sustained tones at the structural turning points — a horizon line you can always find. And in place of the more mechanical sound-objects of the debut, the concrete palette here is entirely of the body: breath, whisper, mouth and tongue clicks, humming, footsteps, hand-rubbing, and a heartbeat that runs, quietly, underneath. It makes the weather feel less like a storm outside the window and more like one happening inside a body.

A pressure system, made visible — the storm as a single rotating point of light.

Six systems

The sequence is a forecast in six parts. “Pressure System” opens at low pressure — breath-forward, heartbeat throughout, the density swelling and receding twice without ever bottoming out. “Small Storm for Piano and Mouth” is the turbulent one, and the piece chosen for the album’s video: it builds to a genuine squall around the two-and-a-half-minute mark, mouth-clicks and tongue-clusters crackling at the peak, before an aftershock returns and passes. “Weather Inside the Strings” is the most pianistic — long sustained notes with fifteen-to-twenty-second decays forming an internal weather of resonance inside an enclosed, reverberant chamber.

Then the back half opens out. “Objects in High Wind” is the percussive, scattered track, footsteps and hand-rubbing and clicks blown around a sparser piano. “A Song Breaks the Forecast” does exactly that — a brief melodic phrase climbs and falls through the middle of the piece, a genuine song surfacing out of the atmosphere before dissolving back into it, and it’s the emotional high point of the record. And “Afterpressure” closes everything down: the slowest rotation, the longest fade-in, a single gentle arc, the heartbeat slowing, and a final low A that decays over twenty-some seconds into silence. The pressure has passed; the room exhales.

The verdict

What’s striking about Unclassifiable Weather is how a concept this systematic — rotation formulas, density curves, a fixed tonal centre — produces something that feels so organic and unforced. The rigor is all in service of atmosphere. You don’t have to know that Er turns clockwise while Sieger turns the other way to feel the music breathing around you; you just feel weather moving through a room. It’s improvisation refined into climate, two players dissolved into a single shared air.

Put it on, let it rotate, and watch a small storm pass. Thirty-five minutes; one continuous sky.

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Unclassifiable Weather by äbädä (Simon Sieger — piano; Eda Er — voice, kalimba, electronics, objects) is out now. Six tracks, 35:06, quadraphonic 4.0 + stereo downmix, 48 kHz / 24-bit. The “Small Storm for Piano and Mouth” video was created by Eda Er.
Tracklist: 1. Pressure System (5:18) · 2. Small Storm for Piano and Mouth (5:46) · 3. Weather Inside the Strings (5:50) · 4. Objects in High Wind (5:27) · 5. A Song Breaks the Forecast (6:10) · 6. Afterpressure (6:35).
Also available at nyxpherelabel.com.

Listen → nyxpherelabel.com