©Lena Ganssmann

©Lena Ganssmann

 

MANKAI

Dora Osterloh - Voice
Silvan Schmid - Trumpet
Simon Jermyn - Bass
Max Santner - Drums, Composition

MANKAI is a new project of Berlin-based drummer and composer Max Santner. The collective is comprised of Dora Osterloh (vocals), Silvan Schmid (trumpet), Simon Jermyn (bass) and Max Santner (drums, composition).

On the new album NAME THE COLOR they melt spontaneity, creativity and musical interaction into a unique band-sound. Tightly composed structures, open sound textures, repetitive melodic patterns and intertwined, overlapping rhythms build the framework for collective improvisation. MANKAI’s central aim is to constantly listen to each other and try to develop new sonic worlds by experimenting together.

The album title refers to a Zen proverb: „Name the color, blind the eye“. It describes a tendency in our society to focus too much on single aspects of an increasingly complex world and thereby lose track of the bigger picture. In a sense the need to categorize things and to look at them separately. The compositions on the album strive to be an antithesis to this tendency, inspired by the idea of thinking about music as a holistic and connecting force. An attempt to find one’s own creativity and become collective inventors, free of categories and genres.

SELECTED REVIEWS

“Der ursprünglich aus Österreich stammende Drummer Max Santner betreibt mit Sängerin Dora Osterloh, Trompeter Silvan Schmid und Bassist Simon Jermyn die Band MANKAI. Deren Album “Name The Color” (Boomslang/Bandcamp) dokumentiert den Prozess einer kollektiven kammermusikalischen Verschränkung, der es immer wieder gelingt, sich in der Improvisation selbst zu befreien. Dabei wird Reibung freigesetzt, aber auch ein Gefühl permanenter Erlösung, die sich wiederum in Leichtigkeit übersetzt. Wie all das passieren kann, wissen nur die vier Beteiligten selbst, doch das staunende Ohr lässt sich nur allzu gern auf dieses gefühlvolle Spektakel ein.”
- Wolf Kampmann (Jazzthing)



”Those taken-for-granted processes of recording – mixing, engineering, mastering – are as important as the music composed by Berlin-based drummer Max Santner and played by his Mankai quartet on this seven-track essay in sonic possibility.

The four include vocalist Dora Osterloh, who is very much the keystone of Santner’s collective, a term always guaranteeing that, while collecting themselves, the band will exercise freedom only within strictish parameters. Santner’s charts never indulge his musicians in the sort of spiky angularity often resulting from no-holds-barred emancipation.

It’s thus probably permissible to envisage all the tracks as songs enunciated with a seemingly endless variety of vocalese and sprechgesang by Osterloh, who is joined, often in unison, by trumpeter Silvan Schmid. His high febrile flights and low chatter echo her own with musical consanguinity.

Each chart’s structure is linear in the sense of a horizontal beyond which the musicians are mostly never required to depart. Above a more-or-less uniform tempo – though there’s a late rallentando in the second track, In Everything – Schmid and Osterloh disport together in mutual, often endearing accord, while below the line Santner’s drums and Irishman Simon Jermyn’s bass reflect in their own timbres and instincts for assertion, the expressive ricocheting going on above. The way the four come together and engage topographically on the same strait can only be ascribed to the rapport of virtuosi.

The album’s title and that of the final track emerge from a Zen proverb – “Name the colour; blind the eye.” According to Santner and company, this illustrates society’s tendency to focus too narrowly on the myriad aspects of a complex world, one of the consequences of which may be an anxiety more appropriate to the 21st century than it was to 6th-century China.

Aided by that studio wizardry, Santner’s band reproduce and investigate all the variants of mental tumult and consternation. In music, even the difficulties of emotional resolution find a means of expression; and jazz combos can do more than swing in a leisurely fashion in common time.”
- Nigel Jarrett (Jazz Journal)



“Der in Berlin lebende österreichische Schlagzeuger und Komponist Max Santner ist ein vielseitig engagierter Musiker (u.a. bei Beatdenker’s Sinularia, Holler My Dear), der nun mit seinem eigenen Bandprojekt „Mankai“ (wobei wohl nicht die so gehypten Superfood- Wasserlinsen gemeint sind) aufhorchen lässt. Das ZEN-Sprichwort „Name the color, blind the eye“ liefert einerseits die Titel für den ersten bzw. letzten Track, andererseits die Ausgangsbasis für das erklärte Ziel des Kollektivs: „Musik als ein ganzheitliches, verbindendes Element zu begreifen“, sozusagen als Gegenpol zum weit verbreiteten Schubladendenken. Dabei bilden die Kompositionen von Max Santner den Rahmen, in dem er selbst sowie die Vokalistin Dora Osterloh, der Trompeter Silvan Schmid und der Bassist Simon Jermyn die verschiedenen Facetten ihrer Instrumente sehr individuell und virtuos erkunden und Sounds im Moment kreativ entstehen und fließen lassen können: von repetitiv/meditativ bis tanzbar, von melodiös bis fragmentarisch – Hauptsache mit offenen Sinnen für die anderen und für die Gesamtheit.”
- Concerto Magazin