GAISTER (Olivia Salvadori, Akihide Monna and Coby Sey) release their self-titled LP via AD 93 on the 1st November 2024.
The record captures the embodiment of an encounter, one moment of the trio’s ongoing relationship as artists who communicate with each other through sound, voice and music. After orbiting in the same circles at each other’s shows around 2016 in London, Sey and Salvadori eventually crossed paths. In 2017 Sey joined Salvadori’s artistic collective Tutto Questo Sentire on a residency in Capalbio, the southernmost part of Tuscany, Italy, and started working together. Down the line the pair ended up joining with Akihide Monna (of Bo Ningen), performing together in 2019 at Camden Art Centre on Cork Street in London.
‘Gaister’ itself is a made up word, sprung from the German ‘Geist’ to mean ‘spirit’, and made into a sound of its own. A purity, spirit and essence is pulled from the trio, in spite of their varying mother tongues (Italian, Japanese and English), musical genres and identities to create something new. Olivia Salvadori’s operatic vocals run free, flowing and moving in synergy with Monna’s rhythmic drumming. Sey sings freely with Salvadori, their voices braided together like a waterfall.
This flowing nature is reflected in the album itself, its timestamps and scores are marked by encounters rather than tracks themselves. This album can be considered as one constant piece and a journey of its own that is not foreclosed, in keeping with the band’s ethos of constant conversation and collaboration.
As Sey speaks of the trio’s relationship: “Olivia, Akihide and I had performed live together once before, several years before this album came to be… and yet, we fully trust each other’s intuition when performing and creating music together because of our unified belief in the ability of sound and music to communicate and connect.”