Roots run deep on ’Candid’, the first LP by Munich-based producer Polygonia and drummer Simon Popp. The record is a perfect blend of their distinct voices, with Popp’s drumset and his signature percussion sounds buzzing around Polygonia's bold and blooming productions.
Comprised of live material recorded at Munich’s ZIRKA in late 2022 and over several studio sessions in-between touring duties, ‘Candid’ is a meadow of herbal Electronic, mystic at times, but joyful nonetheless.

On his third album Blizz Munich-based drummer and producer Simon Popp further blurs the line between electronic and organic sounds. In carefully crafted, slow-growing tracks tuned metal percussions cut through searing synth pads, sucking the listener into a sonic vortex. Informed by personal and spiritual themes, Popp’s debut album Laya, as well as his 2021 follow-up Devi make use of rhythms as storytelling mechanisms. Contrasting light and dark, organic and synthetic sounds, his compositions engage in a dance of subtle complexities, enticing the listener into the practice of close listening.

Throughout Blizz, a panopticon of metallophones takes flight, floating freely over earth-bound counter rhythms, conjuring up call and response techniques inherent in polyrhythmic music. This technique favors experimentation over perfectionism, leaving space for happy accidents to unlock new melodic possibilities. According to Popp, “it’s much more interesting to try to push the boundaries of an instrument to see what’s possible.”

Fazer’s music cannot simply be described as Jazz; the Munich band is shaped by the experimental pop music of Talk Talk, the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, the Krautrock of Can and the dub techno of Rhythm & Sound, but masterfully take aspects of all this and more, to create their own sonic identity. Each player and their instrument has an individuality, but together they blend into an organic and flowing overall sound.

Coming from different musical backgrounds, the members of Fazer met while studying jazz at the Academy for Music and Theatre in Munich. The German city has a rich history of improvised music; home to labels ECM (Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Steve Reich) and Enja (Archie Shepp, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones) as well as Krautrock icons Amon Düül II, Popol Vuh & Embryo.

‘II’ is the second album by drum experimentalists Simon Popp and Florian König aka ‘9ms’. Following up on their debut ‘Pleats’, the Munich-based musicians further expanded their toolbox of synthesizers, effects and tonal percussion to create a fusion of Trip Hop, Krautrock and Dub.

Percussive Maintenance is an initiative by drummer Simon Popp and Squama aimed at forming new ties through improvisation. For the monthly events at ZIRKA in Munich, Simon invites fellow artists to engage in an open-format collaboration. The second episode featured Embryo’s Marja Burchard on vibraphone and the recording is now available on tape in a limited edition.

"It seems the kind of music is most interesting where one senses the artists are really trying to drive music itself forward. Sometimes that involves bringing themselves as people forward, by moving into new territories via improvisation, experimentation, collaboration. By exploring different genres and mediums of art. By simply trying to make art at all."
Joshua Minsoo Kim on Twitter Jan 10, 2022 10:56 AM

This music was conceived and recorded in one afternoon session at Simon’s studio on March 19, 2021. In order to maintain the immediacy of this event, the three tracks were cut directly to vinyl for a limited run of 50 dubplates.

After several collaborative releases, German drummer Simon Popp is back on Squama with his second solo album ‘Devi’. While his phenomenal debut ‘Laya’ was a percussive take on ambient and third stream minimalism, ‘Devi’ features eight tracks of bold organic grooves, uplifting and hopeful in one moment, sinister and dark in the next. This dualism is reflective of the ups and downs in Simon’s own life, making the album a brutally honest and deeply personal record. Over the past two years Popp has steadily refined his skills both as a player and an engineer: There are virtuoso drumming parts, revealing his passion for polyrhythm and complex structures and recording techniques such as heavy limiting, using gated reverb and pitch-shifting give the record a modern 90s vibe. ‘Devi’ is a forceful statement of what contemporary drum music can sound like today.

9ms is the duo of Simon Popp and Florian König. On their wide ranging debut album ‚Pleats‘ the tech-savvy drummers offer grooves from the dubbier realms of World Music and Krautrock - some meditative and light, some thick as wall and steady as a clock. The album was recorded live in a large wooden hall in the Bavarian Alps with only three microphones. Using various infrared and magnetic field sensors, Popp and König were able to translate their movements into control voltage, which they then used to trigger and tweak synthesizers and a myriad of effects. A way for two humans to become one with their mystic machinery.

Simon Popp and Sebastian Wolfgruber aka Fazer Drums team up with Tunisian producer Azu Tiwaline for the second part of their hybrid Sound Measures series.
On the A side, the Munich-based duo’s pure and raw drumming gets more melodic than on the first edition. With interwoven, polyrhythmic grooves they explore the concept of counterpoint, drawing inspiration from Gamelan, Afro-Cuban and Swing.
That’s material made in heaven for Azu Tiwaline, who made sizeable waves this year with her Magnetic Service EP on Bristol’s Livity Sound.
In her rework, she kept the focus on the drums, boiling down and rearranging the different parts into a 7-minute beast of a tune. Layers of her signature dubbed-out electronics add to the mystic aura, while maintaining the dynamics and musicality of the recordings.

Runden is a collaboration by Martin Brugger (bass) and Simon Popp (drums), both of contemporary Jazz quintet Fazer, and neo-classical pianist Carlos Cipa. Their debut LP is a conceptual record reflecting on Minimal Music, Afrobeat, and Dub Techno of the late 90s/early 2000s. While Cipa’s solo works build on clear harmonies, for the recordings of Runden he prepared the piano to make it sound like a faintly tonal percussion instrument and his mechanical patterns contrast the syncopated drum grooves of Popp and the deep and sparse bass lines of Brugger. The musicians explore, over the course of seven tracks, the concept of circular music. Each piece is based on a four-bar-motif played in a loop and varied subtly but steadily over time, creating a sense of eternal recurrence and timelessness. This makes Runden a meditative but demanding record, that only grows with every listen.

In addition to their congenial drumming in Munich’s Jazz quintet Fazer, Simon Popp and Sebastian Wolfgruber channel World Music, Afrobeat and Jazz drumming in their Duo project Fazer Drums.

Their first release on Squama Recordings called „Sound Measures“ is a juxtaposition of different approaches to rhythm. On the A-Side, the duo takes you on a drumming trip though feathery spheres and bold grooves, while on the B-side, Techno stalwarts Zenker Brothers crafted the material into a funky and mystic IDM jam.

This release is 2019 coming full circle. Two B-sides from Fazer and Popp, whose albums we released last year, share a 10" dubplate with a letter-pressed sleeve.
Gahu Dub by Fazer is a laid-back psychedelic jam based on the recreational Gahu dance of the Ewe people from Togo and Ghana.

‘Nadi’ follows the underground success of their self-released debut ‘Mara’, which quickly sold out on vinyl and became one of the most streamed jazz records of the year. Moving freely between composition and improvisation, the band’s spacious, organic sound pitches lyrical melodies from guitar and trumpet over double-drummer polyrhythmic grooves and dub-like basslines.

With seemingly effortless precision and a sense for the imperfect, Popp merges Ambient, Third Stream and Minimal Music on his debut album „Laya“. The title derives from the Sanskrit language and signifies a place of rest and mental inactivity. In the spring of 2019 Popp created these 8 tracks from hours of improvisation in his own studio. The moments thus captured were then enriched with more sounds and effects to add layers and shed the manually played percussion of all its earthliness. The result is an album of concealed complexity and unadorned beauty.

MARA is the debutalbum of Munich-based jazz group FAZER. The young musicians combine African and Latin rhythms with dubby basslines and melancholic melodies. The unusual lineup with two drummers, bass , guitar and trumpet leaves an open space for unfettered improvisation. Through the concept of repetition and finely measured dynamics, Fazer create a drawing energy that can be felt directly at their live shows and has been captured perfecty on this record.