Philipp Gropper's Philm 2025

Almost seven years after their last release, numerous international tours, a change of drummer and the award for „Best Band" at the first edition of the German Jazz Prize 2021, PHILM, tenor saxophonist and composer Philipp Gropper's band with Elias Stemeseder (piano, synths), Robert Landfermann (double bass), and now Leif Berger (drums), is releasing two new albums on January 27, 2026. Not a double album, but two independent artistic works that stem from the same sound world, yet address different themes. In their own way, instrumental, grown out of jazz, sharpened by experimental and beat music, with a wide variety of influences.
„2024" was named after the year it was created and recorded in Zentrifuge, an old Berlin cinema. "In August that year, the whole band in one room, we were searching for rhythmic mantras" Philipp Gropper explains, „for new, multi-layered rhythms and unfamiliar forms". As a result, each song is based on its own "weird groove," as he puts it. Catapulted into strange worlds by Gropper's compositions, PHILM is all about the emotional content of these grooves and navigating in them together. And it works, because the band has internalized the complex structures and so everyone can still speak directly and from the heart with their instrument.
For example, the track "ray," that paints a picture of warm sunbeams, to then, through a swift change of perspective, suddenly fly along with them – it is a bouncy 3/4 septol beat, with a 7:2 and 7:3 undercurrent. Or "high purple," a high in three parts – built of quintuplet layers over quarter and eighth notes as a rhythmic counterpoint. The trilogy "riddim 345" can certainly be understood as an homage to the sound of Jamaican riddims, but is far removed, if only because of its structure – a 3/4 time signature that is simultaneously 4/4 and 5/4. PHILM's members' mutual respect for each other's practices, their interpersonal chemistry and the adventurous creative atmosphere in the studio left marks on the sound. PHILM is not about outdoing each other with solos, but about finding a shared musical language, and about creating together, like an interlocking sound machine.
The second album, „2025",was recorded live at Cologne's venue Loft in April 2025. The sound here is darker and more emotional. Philipp Gropper and the band focused on different themes, for instance "our mainly right-wing, ice-cold neoliberal government, social injustices, the fragmentation of society", Gropper lists, and asks "where does it go, what can we do"? These questions open the album with "what to?". "I always try to translate life, the world, what's on my mind or what I observe, directly into music. I start from there, not from musical ideas or concepts", Gropper says about his composing process.
The two pieces "no words" I and II are good examples of his approach, as they deal with feelings of bewilderment and horror in the face of current geopolitical crises, wars and the ongoing destructive role of the global north. Between dissonance and beauty, a wide range of emotions unfolds. Gropper's saxophone is sometimes reminiscent of an Arabic ney, while Stemeseder's piano seems to give space to anger.
In contrast to this is the gentle "eyes/sorry,", a melancholic meditation and an attempt at an apology, that with its synthesizer elements eventually seems as if it is taking off. It escapes into other spheres, into space, only to land back on earth in a moment of humility and acceptance - which the last track, "*," wonderfully follows up on. It sends the album's listeners back out into the world with a glimmer of hope.
With 2024 and 2025, PHILM are opening a new chapter for themselves and further refining their long-standing and rightly celebrated consequent understanding of jazz and storytelling through music, which has had a decisive influence on the European avant-garde. Their new home is the Berlin label BRETFORD, previously known for punk and post-punk, but also for a shared attitude. And so PHILM and the two albums fit perfectly into the program: 2024 and 2025 are not easy listening, but they aim to entertain in the best sense of the word and to captivate their audience. These are two albums that invite their listeners on a journey beyond genre conventions, and it is an invitation that shouldn't be declined.
– Aida Baghernejad
(translated to english with deepL)