In the beginning, Kai created two notes, a fifth apart, like heaven from earth, with nothingness between them. No minor, no major, no something that would tell you how it feels in the nothingness, whether lonely or secure. Until then, still groping, a movement awakens, a first mover out of the nothingness. As if nature were opening its eyes, nature is rhythm, a heartbeat that hovers between two tones and takes new tones into the movement, which becomes more and more, the rhythms circle around each other, shift against each other, they fall into each other and quietly collapse, in the end two tones, two facts, Kai Schumacher.

Although there could be more, several Kais and Schumachers, whom you listen to playing together, sometimes with, sometimes against each other. You follow one heartbeat while listening, then another, you are constantly losing your heart and finding others, as if in a gentle "intoxication", which is how Schumacher titled his first album with his own compositions in 2019.

They don't write you ads, they don't put happy harmonies in your ear and no melodies. Except the ones you compose yourself by following their heartbeats. "At some point," says Francesco Tristano, the Luxembourg pianist with whom he recorded one of the six works on the new album, "at some point I wondered when Kai would start composing. At some point while listening, you ask yourself when you yourself started composing what they play together. "Tranceformer" is the name of the piece.

Similarly tranceform, when piano and drums flow into each other - on "Drift" Philo Tsoungui, drummer of "The Mars Volta", drums her way into Kai's finger play as if casually - or when you ask yourself on "Scapes_Spaces" how many hands there are in the end that you hear - here there are four again, the two that are added are those of Moritz Fasbender aka Friederike Bernhardt. Who is what, what is how - wonderfully light-handed, how Schumacher dissolves identitarian aesthetics, how he makes music fluid and transcendent, literally: transcending.

In the beginning, two notes, imperceptibly you now drive the pieces forward yourself, as if you had changed sides while listening. Kai Schumacher explains this phenomenon with the "physicality" of his music, which goes back to the "natural motor function of the hands". They are like heaven and earth and therefore do things that - nature is rhythm - feel like a given, a flow of play arises, it does not accumulate tension, it carries it along. And where does it take you? Is it techno? Party? Trance? Or classical music, concert, devotion? There is no "or".

Tranceformer is now available physically and digitally on all music plattforms.