Alchemia Garden

Intakt CD 302 Alchemia Garden: the album’s wonderful title, creates an enchanting, ambiguous effect. Lucas Niggli relates the organic, biological and growing, which develops on its own and is cultivated and maintained in the form of the garden, to the metamorphosis of material, the scientific search for something unknown which historically has been seen to generate something new. During his thirty years of playing live Lucas Niggli recorded with many musicians like Aly Kei¨ta, Barry Guy, Sylvie Courvoisier, Luciano Biondini, Michel Godard, Andreas Schaerer, Nils Wogram, Elliott Sharp, Steamboat Switzerland, Erika Stucky. He has occasionally given solo concerts, for example a performance at the big John Cage Festival in Switzerland in the late 1980s at which Cage himself witnessed Niggli’s performance of 27’ 10.554” for a Percussionist. It is time, in the best sense, for Lucas Niggli to release a solo album. What a great way to celebrate one’s own 50th birthday – with this gift to himself and the listener. New York critic Laurence Donohue-Greene writes in the liner notes: „as a drummer blessed with a percussionist’s intuitive sense and virtuosic capability and range, Niggli’s memorable solo performances here unquestionably add to the tradition of the great solo drummers who preceded him while keeping an eye on the horizon.“