Simon Popp - Trio (LP)

Rhythm has always been more than just for timekeeping. It is inherent to us, instinctive and ritualistic. It is the first communal act, shared before language. Rhythm has been the very core of what it means to be human, the backbone of a millennia of singing, dancing, human expression and interconnectedness. It is with this primal understanding that Munich-based percussionist Simon Popp approaches Trio, his new album and the first made in collaboration with two fellow percussionists, Sebastian Wolfgruber and Flurin Mück.

At its heart, Trio is a work about collaboration, playfulness and unification. It is music as a means of coming together, a sonic equivalent to the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi, in which broken ceramics are repaired with a visible golden lacquer. Rather than hiding the breaks, Kintsugi embraces them, making them part of the story, a form of delicate transformation. Popp and his collaborators take a similar approach: three distinct drummers, three different temperaments, three personal styles. Fused together into a single expressive instrument.

“Often it feels like one big setup played by three people,” says Popp, describing the sessions. “The same way the stone on the album cover is one stone made of three parts.”

Popp’s musical journey to this project was a slow unfolding. Inspired first by his uncle, a drummer, he began playing at age nine. Early experiences included everything from orchestras to percussion ensembles to local bands, forming what he describes as “a versatile, varied” musical upbringing.

Rock and jazz were early influences, but also the works of Steve Reich, whose minimalist approaches opened Popp’s young adult mind to how rhythm and repetition can create beautiful music.

His formal studies in jazz drumming in Munich expanded his vocabulary further and importantly, introduced him to Wolfgruber and Mück. Over the past decade, he’s earned a reputation for restless experimentation, with his projects Fazer, 9ms, Poeji and Polygonia & Simon Popp and through three previous solo records that blend ambient, jazz, electronic and percussive exploration. Yet Trio represents something new, not just a sonic evolution, but a philosophical one.

Popp’s earlier albums were composed and recorded solo, with live performance bringing in added musicians as a necessary adaptation, Trio developed organically through regular sessions and playing together in Popps’ studio . The compositions would start as tiny seeds. A rhythmic phrase, a pattern, a two-sentence idea, and were grown collectively.

“We’d meet regularly, just hang out, play, make jokes,” Popp recalls. “A lot of the music came out of that fun, that connection.”

That spirit infuses the album’s tracks. On “Wallride,” for example, the mobile absorber walls of Popp’s studio were struck with sticks to produce deep thudding tones that drive the track forward. “High High Low” is built around a tiny motif — two highs, one low — that the trio playfully bends, stretches and overlaps. “Birkenschlag” plays with asymmetry, using an 11/8 pulse to dance around the beat rather than sit directly on it. On “OiOOiOiiOi,” a sequence of right and left strokes becomes an obsessive mantra, played together by the three players like a ritual phrase. “Eggplant” layers two distinct grooves beneath a third freer voice, producing a loose, floating tension.

Despite the technical precision and percussive detail, there is nothing rigid or academic in Trio. The album is filled with a global spirit, venerated not only with the traditional beating of drumheads, but wood blocks, singing bowls, tuned gongs, temple bells, metal pipes, tongue drums and piezo-amplified electronic textures.

The use of electronics and processing throughout the record adds a subtle shimmer. Echo, delay and saturation are used not to distance the listener but to deepen the atmosphere. These effects serve as a kind of golden thread, binding the natural and synthetic, the ancient and the modern, the individual and the collective. Like in Kintsugi, what might have remained separate is made whole, its joins not hidden but celebrated.

The album is a celebration of timbre, texture, and touch, its sound palette drawn from across continents and traditions. Human beings at all points of time, across all cultures and continents have used music to celebrate, mourn, worship and bond. Along with our voices, creating rhythm with our bodies. Clapping, stomping, hitting with sticks. This sits at the core of what it means to express our humanity. That is the spirit of Trio. A celebration of rhythm as both a shared human memory and an audible expression of close bonds.

In the end, Trio is not just an album about drums. It is an album about connection. About the joy of collaboration, the beauty of imperfection and the timeless pull of rhythm as a shared human force. The cracks are not hidden. They are filled with gold.