IFANAME
Johan Berthling
@johanberthling Mats Gustafson
@matsgustafssonsax Jan St. Werner
@fiepblattercatalogue
SONIG97-LP
Edition of 300 copies including Download Codes
A debut of volatile geometry and sonic combustion
Mats Gustafsson met Jan St. Werner for the first time in 2019, performing alongside Peter Brötzmann and a constellation of improvisers over three charged days at Berlin’s Flutgraben. From the outset, Mats and Jan shared more than a stage — they shared an ethos: to not merely perform in rooms, but with them, activating architecture, bending sound through diversion and reflection.
Mats introduced Johan Berthling shortly after — a seismic addition. His bass work, dense and sinuous, folds into the volatile flurries of Gustafsson’s saxophone and pedal arrays, and Werner’s disembodied digital machinery. Together, they sculpt sonic matter with urgency, treating sound as an adventurous substance — elastic, elusive, and constantly reforming itself in real time.
The trio doesn’t settle. It dissects and reassembles musical forms with restless ease — a hyperactive exchange, rich in detail, open to friction. The music of IFANAME is at once immediate and ungraspable. Nothing stabilizes; and yet, it holds — a strange adhesive, alluring, irreverent, until it evaporates just as unpredictably as it came into being.
IFANAME is inquiry and unease. It is music, yes, but also motion — of thought, attention, care, curiosity, and collapse. It offers no resolution. Instead, it asks: what if sound were not a statement but a question? A catastrophe with memory?
Wherever IFANAME emerged from, something more is always threatening to emerge again — behind us, ahead of us, and all around our listening.
Artwork Paul McDevitt
@farbvision Art Direction Rupert Smyth
Distributed by
@anostanost @a_musik_recordshop 
