Fuchsthone Orchestra feat. Evi Filippou

CD Releasetour PEAKS & PLOTS

Virtuoso and urgent. This is how you can describe the music of the outstanding 22-piece "Fuchsthone Orchestra" by Christina Fuchs and Caroline Thon - both experienced big band and ensemble leaders who came together in 2019 to form a joint orchestra in Cologne for which they write and conduct their respective compositions.
They released their debut album "Structures & Beauty" in 2023 and are now releasing their follow-up album "Peaks & Plots", with Greek vibraphonist and percussionist Evi Fillipou as the orchestra's guest soloist. "Peaks" are the highlights, events, encounters and experiences of the year 2025, musically realized by the two composers in "Plots", the storylines and narratives. As in "Savita", composed by Caroline Thon and dedicated to the young German Ukraine aid worker Savita Diana Wagner, who wrote about the war in her touching front-line blog diary and was killed during her aid mission. As in "Taksim" by Christina Fuchs, with field recordings from Istanbul, the chants of the muezzin and city noises as an overall sound picture of the metropolis. It was also created during a period of political unrest when she was there on an artist residency. "Taksim" is the name of the central square, but also means "musical improvisation".
Or in the restless, revolting composition "Le Champ" by Caroline Thon, based on the field theory of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as an appeal for a fairer distribution of resources. According to Thon, some passages have the aggressive energy of rock music, combined with electronic minimal music, the element of word as sound and the metallic-melodic soundscapes of Evi Fillipou's vibraphone. When composing, she also follows Bela Bartók's core motif theory of developing a complex musical work from a single compositional cell through continuous variation. Christina Fuchs describes her compositional practice as a search for sound and expansion. Starting with rhythm, she develops compositional sketches that become sound collages as fragments. Layers that interlock and overlap like events. "Every chord has a verticality for me," she explains. Caroline Thon begins with a melodic idea that expands into an overall composition. With layered arcs of tension. Always with the aim of taking an artistic stance on socio-political issues and continuously expanding and deepening her compositional spectrum in terms of sound. Fuchs and Thon work with condensed rhythmic and melodic textures of bobbin lace sound structures, electronics and live sampling by computer musician and sound artist Eva Pöpplein, which they combine with big band brass movements, violin and vocals to create a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Expanding and dissolving genre boundaries, noise surfaces are formed, into which virtuoso brass movements immerse themselves, from which solos and improvisational inner surfaces emerge, slowing down to a whisper, only to become a large-scale soundscape again. A dynamic of silence and the energy of erupting, brute tutti. Masterfully conducted by the two conductors, as a sonic narrative and tracing of form and material, of peaks and plots.