There is a radical modesty at the heart of ‘given,’ the new trio recording by Eva-Maria Houben, Harmjan Roeles, and producer/engineer Roeland van Niele. Modesty not as withdrawal, but as a disciplined form of attention. Across its three movements, “given 1,” “given 2,” and “given 3,” the album unfolds as an inquiry into what remains when musical intention is pared down to breath, contact, and the fragile meeting of two bodies in sound.
Recorded on the Fischer & Krämer organ (1994/95) at St. Thomas Morus in Krefeld, Houben’s instrument does not assert itself with ecclesiastical grandeur. Instead, it breathes. Her organ tones hover at the threshold of audibility, emerging like condensation on cool air. Roeles’ double bass does not accompany in any conventional sense; it leans into the organ’s exhalations, sometimes shadowing their contours, sometimes introducing a grain of friction that feels less like counterpoint and more like shared vulnerability. Van Niele’s role as producer is not decorative but structural: he frames silence as carefully as sound, allowing the acoustic space to become the third, invisible performer.
“given 1” begins almost imperceptibly. A low organ tone gathers itself, tentative and sustained, as though testing the moral weight of existing at all. The bass responds not with melody but with a presence; wood, string, and rosin articulating the fact of touch. The music seems to ask, in each extended duration, why it should continue. Yet continuation itself becomes the answer. The piece does not build toward climax; it deepens into awareness. Each sustained pitch feels provisional, offered up only to be relinquished. Listening becomes an act of companionship with disappearance.
In “given 2,” the exchange grows more porous. The organ’s harmonics shimmer at the edges of pitch, and Roeles’ bowing introduces a subtle instability that unsettles any easy consonance. The duo’s practice (two players in close proximity, sometimes radically apart, sometimes nearly fused), finds its most poignant expression here. There are passages where the organ’s tone seems to dissolve into the bass’s resonance, as if the boundary between wind and string had thinned to transparency. The effect is not fusion but adjacency: two distinct beings sharing a space without erasing one another. In this tension between separation and connection, the album’s philosophical core becomes audible.
“given 3” carries a quiet gravity. The gestures are slightly more exposed, the intervals a touch more open, as though the musicians have accepted the inevitability of loss that the project’s title implies. Sounds are released more readily, allowed to fall away without regret. What might have felt austere earlier now feels generous. The music’s sparseness is not deprivation but offering. Each tone is given, surrendered, and, through the attentive listening it invites, given again.
What distinguishes ‘given’ from much contemporary minimalism is its refusal of aesthetic purity as an end in itself. Houben and Roeles are not pursuing reduction for its own sake; they are inhabiting it as a form of life. The organ’s sustained lines and the bass’s fragile articulations point beyond compositional strategy toward an ethics of relation. In a world saturated with assertion, this recording insists on receptivity. In a cultural climate inclined toward spectacle, it risks near-invisibility. In doing so, it restores to sound a kind of moral seriousness without solemnity. Something is always being offered, even if only for a moment. Something is always being lost. And in the quiet persistence of breath through pipe and bow, ‘given’ suggests that this cycle of offering, losing, and receiving again may be reason enough.
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