I first witnessed enduring Dutch anarcho-jazz-punks The Ex above an Oxford pub in 1987. Today they are friends. “I’m not sure you’re familiar with Kaja Draksler’s work,” their guitarist Andy Moor explained by email, “but she’s one of my favorite composer-pianists on the planet. I play guitar in her band matter 100 and Lena, the daughter of Terrie from The Ex, sings. It’s great when you play music long enough to be in bands with your friends’ children! I suggested you for liner notes because you like improvised music but also folk and punk and this band has all three.”
Here are the known knowns. Draksler was born on February 6th 1987 in Kranj in Slovenia, beginning piano aged four. She studied composition under Cornishman Richard Ayres at the Conservatorium Van Amsterdam, wrote a thesis on free jazz’s sunglasses-sporting enfant gris Cecil Taylor, and took piano lessons in New York with his spiritual heirs Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer. From 2007 onwards there’s a smorgasbord of jazz ensemble credits which don’t lead in the obvious direction of matter 100.
Like the Czech improvisor and violinist Iva Bittova, Draksler seems tied to the folkloric tonalities of the earth, deeper than anything gleaned from the Dutch conservatoire or the New York loft.
Draksler gave a modest explanation of the process she embarked on, after matter 100 was commissioned by Amsterdam’s doughty experimental venue, The Bimhuis; “I was a few months pregnant when
I received the commission. The name, matter 100, comes from a Slovenian phrase meaning ‘hundred mothers’, used when something is too much, as in ‘it rains like one hundred mothers’. /… / My first idea was making an alternative-pop band playing songs with clear forms; /… / Since Bimhuis asked me to involve Amsterdam people, Andy was a no-brainer. We’ve been friends for years but never played together. Lena was an obvious choice too: her bright voice and poppy singing, and her captivating stage presence. I wanted to work with Samo Kutin because of his unique treatment of the hurdy-gurdy. Macio Moretti, the drummer, is a true original from the Warsaw scene I knew by reputation, and Marta Warelis is a friend I’ve wanted to work with forever.”
Grafting Hessels’s phrasing into true or false is a move of counterintuitive genius, exemplified by the contrast of her mellifluous daydream vocal in Alternating Current, conceived by Draksler as a ‘pop ballad’, and some typical Moor guitar scree at the start of Drunker Etc. Instantly we experience the drummer, Moretti, as comfortable with the precise cadences of Hessels’s vocal and the accompanying flittering pianissimo, as he is with the sudden shift into the free fuzz of Moor’s guitar. How did Draksler synch up such different disciplines?
“In order to write the music, I took long forest walks with my daughter in a baby wrap, thinking of lines, riffs, and rhythms, recording them on my Nokia. When the musicians met in August 2023 at my place in Trboje, they all gave suggestions on form, arrangement, and instrumentation. /… / My original idea was to write the lyrics too, but I am a miserable poet, so I dropped the idea; luckily I discovered Dean Young via an acquaintance.”
Young unlocks this project. Flood Plain is an object lesson in how his poetry is precise enough, with subtle scansion, to give Hessels something singable, but abstract enough to service the music’s more elliptical moments. The Texan poet laureate, Young was born in 1955 and assimilated the same heady Baudelairean perfumes that beguiled the Soho symbolist Rosemary Tonks into the plain speaking idiom of post-war American poetry. Young’s star turn is The Brutal Filament Inside Aglow, his words, read by Moretti, largely unadorned, save for swelling undercurrents of smoldering noise. I’m sure he would have approved
of what the group do to True/False, a ‘list poem’ expanded to thirty minutes as the record’s crowning moment. Moor’s voice sounds especially plaintive, despite his best efforts to avoid cheap sentiment, as
Hessels runs down the clock. “Spaghetti is done when it sticks to the wall. Stay with me and be my love.”
Dean Young died in Cincinnati in 2022, from COVID complications. In 2002 he told Massachusetts University’s Jubilat journal his poems were ‘demonstrations’ not intended to be understood, with the process of creation more important than the work. The exoskeleton of process is clearly visible outside the body of true or false. The record doesn’t shield you from what it is. But did true or false require special measures to achieve its finished form? “BMC approached me after our first show,” Draksler recalls. “We recorded at their venue, a building with classical halls, a basement jazz club, a restaurant, and sleeping facilities. The mix and master was done by Stian Westerhus, whose spaciousness and depth, and attention to detail, I’ve enjoyed for years. In my ears, he added a Scandinavian touch to it.” Indeed. The frosty sonic precision you’d normally hear on an ECM release, framing the sounds of some tasteful Norwegian honking, are here pressed into service of a noise normally recorded live, in a rush, at Dalston’s Café Oto or some downtown Chicago dive, where its innate energy would compensate for rough edges and spikes. I am reminded of that strange panicked post-psychedelic era when bewildered labels like RCA and CBS spent proper money recording Tony Oxley or Gavin Bryars in proper Seventies studios. Suddenly, matter
100 seems an essential element of that same ongoing lineage, still pulling musical ideas in different directions, to see what sticks, and what snaps. Or, as the great British improvisor Derek Bailey once put it, in a postcard he sent me containing a single scrawled phrase; “The struggle continues.”

Stewart Lee, writer/clown,
Orphir, Orkney, July 2026