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Achim Gaetjen - Swim Two Birds
Achim Gaetjen, composer, saxophonist and video-art creator from Bremen - Germany
About Me
The band Swim Two Birds is surely one of the most outstanding discoveries in the German scene
this decade. Traditionally critics and audiences except New York to exhibit the latest metropolitan
hipness in avant-garde-music…
Swim Two Birds have drawn their own conclusions: their sound is explosive, risky, rebellious. A
critic once named their music: “No Wave Jazz Punk Noise Funk Call It Anything” … and he was
right.
For more than ten years and with changing line-ups, the seven-person band around saxophonist
and composer Achim Gätjen has been working on music that, on a swinging jazz basis, repeatedly
draws on other genres and incorporates new material into the band’s universe. At first, it
sometimes even sounded like the harsh escapades of John Zorn, and the friendship with the
Universal Congress Of, which revitalized jazz with the energy of hardcore under the aegis of Joe
Baizas, was almost inevitable.
On stage, this phase is still honored with the composition “Salomon Grundy”. The new material
from Swim Two Birds still shines with stylistic openness, but seems much more compact, as can
be heard on the new album “No Regrets” (Laika Records). As band leader and saxophonist Achim
Gätjen once told us in an interview: “My goal was always to create a band that performs as a unit.”
The songs move virtuosically between big band styles, western guitars, rock, mariachi, sinister,
dragged-out blues and a lot more – without becoming even remotely stylistically fragmented.
Singer GU tells bizarre stories from the hours between night and day between recitation and
crooning. Even “Hubcaps & Taillights” by Henry Mancini and the Perry Mason theme fit in, as if
Swim Two Birds had thought it up themselves.
What we were supposed to be sold some time ago as part of the much-vaunted but never really
taken off here swing revival is old news, limited and conservative compared to what these people
are doing here.