Though emphatically a departure, Vertical Ascent retraces various signatures of Moritz' seminal collaborations with Mark Ernestus— the fastidious density of sound, the massive bass and detailed upper registers (‘a frequency massage’, Ricardo Villalobos has called this album), the stripped, stepping repetitiousness, the seriousness. But this is a different team of musicians, and striking differences stem from the qualities of live performance (the driving, clattering percussion, and the loose, improvisatory approach), the exploded palette of sounds, including a trace of steel drums, a cuica.
