| Jazz |
A sonic journey through the light and silence of the Aegean
There are albums that don’t just play, they unfold like a memory. They drift into your consciousness and awaken something ancient, something you can’t quite name. Inside the Island, the latest release by Quadro Nuevo, belongs to that rare category of music that feels less like a recording and more like a voyage, one that begins somewhere deep within and radiates outward toward the horizon.
For those who have wandered far and wide since their teenage years, there remain fragments that no amount of distance can erase: the echo of laughter on a summer street, the scent of home-cooked meals drifting from an open window, a child kicking a ball through a dusty alley while the afternoon light flickers off the stones. Inside the Island gathers all of these traces — the sounds, the silences, the ghosts of places loved and left behind, and distills them into a language of melody and mood.
It is, at heart, an invitation to travel without moving. The album feels like early morning sunlight on a terrace by the sea, the cry of gulls suspended in salt air, the slow unfolding of a day you wish would never end.
Where the waves carve silence
Even the story of its creation reads like poetry. “Born on the Greek island of Samos,” the group writes, “where waves, light, and sun sculpt the landscape, where ancient villages cling to the hills and the local kafenion remains a meeting place for souls, there, the four musicians withdrew to create a music scented with lemon, wild rosemary, and the gentle melancholy of the South.”
There’s something sacred in that retreat, an artist’s refusal to chase the noise of the world. Far from the tourists and the predictable clichés of paradise, Quadro Nuevo sought something quieter: the kind of stillness that lets reality breathe. Their quest was not for perfection, but for essence. And when they stop somewhere, you can feel it, as if they leave behind a trace, a fingerprint on time itself.
Listening to their work, one feels compelled to whisper, “I was there.” Each note, each pause, carries a geography of emotion: the memory of sea spray, the weight of dusk, the longing of a place that might never have existed except in the mind of the listener.
The geography of sound
What Quadro Nuevo achieves here is less about technical prowess than about atmosphere — the art of evocation. Their arrangements unfold like cinematography. They play with shadow and light the way a film’s lighting designer deepens a scene without ever drawing attention to the craft.
The album begins in the tonal colors of Eastern Europe, a faint echo of Romani laments and Balkan folk dances, before it sets sail toward warmer waters. Soon we are somewhere else: perhaps on a Greek island, perhaps on Jersey in the height of summer. The geography remains deliberately blurred. This music doesn’t dictate where you are; it simply welcomes you wherever you wish to go.
That’s the quiet genius of jazz when it’s handled with such delicacy: it becomes borderless. Inside the Island feels like a postcard from an unknown place, one that somehow smells familiar, of salt, of time, of home.
And Will Be — the promise of motion
With guitarist Philipp Schiepek contributing three original compositions, the record takes on a deeper dimension. His piece “And Will Be” captures the essence of vastness, the sensation of movement within stillness. It speaks to the paradox of the sea: always changing, never different.
In “And Will Be,” melody becomes memory, and memory becomes motion. It’s as if the music were conversing with its own history, glancing backward while still propelling forward. The result is open, searching, infinite. For a few minutes, sound becomes the architecture of becoming, telling stories too subtle to put into words, yet profoundly alive.
A timeless conversation
Albums like this are rare. Rarer still are those that can sustain attention not through spectacle but through depth, through an unhurried unfolding that rewards patience and presence.
There’s a moment, midway through Inside the Island, when the saxophone seems to speak in prose rather than notes. It’s a kind of musical literature, not because it tells a story, but because it allows one to happen within the listener. That’s the mark of serious artistry: when each track is not just composed but composed of meaning.
Even the sequencing of the pieces feels intelligent, almost narrative. The album takes its time, and so must you. The journey isn’t complete until the final tone fades into silence, the kind of silence that feels earned.
The art of simplicity
Perhaps what moves most about Inside the Island is its humility. Despite its sophistication, it is ultimately an ode to simplicity, to a life in rhythm with the world rather than against it. It’s music that breathes, that remembers, that forgives.
Inspired, perhaps, by ancient Greece, but certainly by years of travel and observation, Quadro Nuevo have crafted an album that seems to exist outside of time. To listen to it is to surrender: to sunlight, to sea wind, to the slow heartbeat of existence.
And when the final notes dissolve, what remains is not absence but presence, the quiet realization that the island is not a place at all.
It’s within you.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, November 19th 2025
Follow PARIS-MOVE on X
::::::::::::::::::::::::
Musicians:
Mulo Francel | tenor sax, clarinet, mandoline, whistle
Andreas Hinterseher | accordion, bandoneon, vibrandoneon
Philipp Schiepek | acoustic guitar Didi Lowka | double bass
Track Listing:
Song For My Bazanaki
The Great Wide Open
Tango to Evora – To Tango Tis Nefelis
Focus Light
And Will Be
Inside the Island
Sea of Stories
Sleepy Sheeps
The Path
Island Skydance
Personal Hero