unknown

unknown emerged from Vienna's improvised music scene, shaped by Marco Eneidi's Monday Night Improvisers Sessions and by workshops with Sabu Toyozumi and Juini Booth. From the outset, improvisation was not an aesthetic choice but a necessity: incantation, ritual, the voice as a channel for forces larger than the self.

For a decade unknown played with saxophonist Mario Rechtern and singer Linda Sharrock in the trio (In) The Abyssity Of The Grounds. After Sharrock's stroke in 2009, the trio rebuilt its performances around radical listening and care, a music Rechtern called Empathoharmonics, governed not by harmony or form but by the condition of the moment. Their work was central to Sharrock's return to the stage, documented on the triple LP GODS (Golden Lab Records, 2016) and Live at Le Guess Who? 2017 (Feathered Coyote Records).

In an acoustic duo with guitarist Eric Arn, in the lineage of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, unknown recorded Paranza Corta (Feeding Tube Records, 2018), praised by Byron Coley for its "telepathic, knife-edge interplay". Solo releases include Rooms (2012), Ebó (2013), Curing Meat at the Back of Beyond (2020), 21 SEELE (2021) and Black Pitch Reigns in the Heavens (2021).

In recent years unknown has turned to the lap steel guitar, with sustain, feedback and resonance as the ground for radical improvisation: sound as direct action, immediate and ritual in its force. Current projects include Howling Mystics, RAU and My Blood Is Confusing.