NOTOPIA

"NOTOPIA is a project to celebrate life. It is about friendship, about music, about doing the things you like to do, and about living your dreams.

The three friends behind the idea of NOTOPIA are guitarist Peter Alexius, drummer Sven Kosakowski and pianist Marc Mennigmann. We build the core of NOTOPIA, adding our friends as guests to complete our musical visions. All songs are instant collective compositions. We simply don’t know what will happen during a studio session, as there are no planned tunes to play, no prepared lead sheets, scores or chords. We talk with our instruments, have a conversation through the music that happens. And we always have a good time. As I said, this is about friendship and music…

NOTOPIA is an evolution of the SAM Project, a recording project Peter, Sven and Marc did with female bass legend Julie Slick in 2012."

While touring Europe, Mike Keneally and Jaan Wessman took part in a recording session with Notopia. The result got released on CD as "Celebrating Life" and can be found here :
https://sam-music.bandcamp.com/album/celebrating-life

20 improvised tracks. I've only listened to a couple of them so far, but it sounds very impressive.



The same recording session also generated "2 Pianos", two improvisations between Mike Keneally and Marc Menningmann.
Download-only.
Beautiful.
Check it out here:
https://sam-music.bandcamp.com/album/two-pianos