DIVR

Divr, whose name is voiced like the word for someone who plunges underwater, formed in Switzerland as a piano-led jazz trio devoted to modernist improvisation. Pianist Philipp Eden, bassist Raphael Walser, and drummer Jonas Ruther comprise the group. Their working method centers on real-time composition that spotlights, directs, and heightens the distinct traits each musician brings to the moment of invention. The resulting pieces consist mostly of acoustic improvisations whose looping figures trace apparently circular paths that never return exactly to their starting points. The trio’s groove emerges without reliance on any single unchanging pulse or conventional meter, yet an intuitive current keeps the players aligned. Attempts to reproduce riffs, vamps, or themes identically in performance invariably produce minute variations, whether captured on record or heard live.

Eden grew up in Basel; his colleagues hail from Zurich, where the three first crossed paths in 2009, though they did not begin performing together as a unit until 2022. That year they formalized the project, and in 2023 they joined the roster of WeJazz before tracking their first album, Is This Water. Veteran producer Dan Nicholls handled post-production and mixing, inserting field recordings, found sounds, and additional textures that supplied extra strata of resonance and significance to the original performances.