On Mature Hybird Talking Frank Gratkowski, one of the world’s most advanced and original voices in the field of improvised music, teams up for the first time with one of the leading ensembles for composed contemporary music. He dedicates this 45-minute piece to James Joyce and Iannis Xenakis, who both had a major impact on him. Inspired by the rhythm and sound of Joyce's language, Gratkowski and the Ensemble Modern create a widely ramified, sensitive and incredibly vital musical organism. Energy states, textures and colours change in wide-awake interaction just as quickly and agile as the diverse materials and compositional strategies that are used. A space opens up in which anything seems possible at any time. With the musicians of the Ensemble Modern Gratkowski has found congenial partners to realise his always structure-oriented concept of improvisation as a kind of instant collective composition. “Listening to Mature Hybird Talking involves taking a journey in time through sonic landscapes, as if navigating a river whose every twist and turn can bring something new and unexpected, while the river itself, in the form of an uncompromisingly non¬idiomatic approach to both precom¬posed and improvised musical creation, remains central even as it alter¬nates unpredictably between rapids and points of repose.” (Richard Barrett in the liner notes)