Dysphotic Zone is a freely improvised solo piano album and it’s Margaux Oswalds debut recording for Clean Feed. The unedited performance was recorded live at the Monopiano Festival in Stockholm.

The album title refers to the ocean layer between 200 and 1,000 meters in the ocean. In this zone, the intensity of light rapidly dissipates as depth increases. Such a minuscule amount of light penetrates beyond a depth of 200 meters that photosynthesis is no longer possible.

Margaux Oswald is a pianist of French-Filipina origin, born in Geneva, and currently based in Copenhagen. She has played the piano since the age of 5, and is now committed to the art of free improvisation.

She has performed internationally with her freely improvised solo concerts, and can also currently be seen in duos with Jesper Zeuthen or Kasper Tranberg, in a trio with Sture Ericsson and Håkon Berre, as well as in her own septet Collateral Damage.

Jan Hocek from Jazzport has written the following about Oswald´s solo performance: “She literally fused with the instrument, forming a single living organism full of emotions with the piano. The variably thickening minimalist areas alternated with meditative dives and free jazz storms. Shards of melodies stroked and injured, tones in lower positions rumbled and gurgled, high ones then cut steel into the ears. Impressions of liberated, crystal-clear tones plunged into the dense lower drone, then dissected, disturbed, and then the wild-minded ones crushed with relentlessly tense expression…”

(Jan Hocek, Jazzport.cz)

All music by Margaux Oswald

Recorded by Göran Stegborn, live at Monopiano festival, Fylkingen, Stockholm on October 24th, 2021 | Mixed and mastered by Anton Toorell
Produced by Margaux Oswald | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos