Surensemble — A Geometric Journey (2015–Present)
Surensemble emerged in Cologne in 2015 as a musical constellation created by Chilean drummer and composer Pablo Sáez. From the outset, the group was conceived less as a fixed formation and more as a geometric structure in motion: a subset of intersecting musical vectors. The name “Surensemble” evokes both direction (“Sur,” or “South”) and a mathematical notion (“ensemble” as a subset), suggesting a sonic architecture built from parts whose meaning arises through their relationships.
Their first recording, the self-titled album Surensemble (2015), laid the foundational grid both visually and compositionally. This initial fusion traced lines that meet at shifting angles, intertwining Afro-rhythms, Andean melodic cells, European chamber music influences, and the improvisational freedom of contemporary jazz. Even at that early stage, critics noted that the band was not simply merging traditions, but constructing sound through a geometric logic: layers, counterpoint, symmetry, and asymmetry in motion.
For their second release, Inmanencia (recorded live in 2018 and released in 2022), Surensemble had expanded its polygon. Recorded at the Loft in Cologne, the album revealed a more architectural approach. The notation drew from Baroque counterpoint, serial structures, and free improvisation. Numbers, present as compositional elements since the first album, became central once again (especially the motif 108, which served as a numerical matrix around which early pieces revolved). The album also incorporates social and philosophical reflection, using voices and texts addressing social inequality and collective memory.
The third album, Stay Together (2024), marks another evolutionary stage: this time, a shift from guitar-based architectural sketches to a meticulously constructed studio landscape shaped by wind instruments. Sáez brought together an expanded ensemble with Latin percussion, winds, and spoken-word contributions from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donatella Di Cesare, invoking themes such as Deconstruction, Diasporization, Exegesis, and Atopia. The press described the album as “jazz between worlds,” where rhythm functions like gravity: an invisible force holding disparate bodies in harmonic orbit.
Since 2015, the ensemble has performed in Aachen, Düsseldorf, Iserlohn, Troisdorf, Frankfurt, and at Winter Jazz in Stadtgarten Köln. Their sound does not settle; it migrates, spins, and relocates like points moving across a shifting plane.
Today, Surensemble operates as a geometric organism:The rhythm section is the axis. The wind instruments trace expanding lines. Improvisation acts as an ellipse: recurring, flexible, never identical. Folklore is the point of origin, a coordinate that remains even as the form expands.
Rather than unfolding in a straight line, Surensemble develops like a mosaic: each album is a new piece or angle reflecting the same foundational pattern. The ensemble continues to evolve, preparing new works that extend its sonic map toward electronics, jazz fusion, and free improvisation. What began as a line in 2015 has become a dynamic figure that keeps redrawing itself without abandoning its original cell.