Lucia Cadotsch and Wanja Slavin re-record songs from their debut Time Rewind on their second album. But actually they are all new pieces, because this time the Science Fiction Band is a whole orchestra that breathes completely new structures, sounds and dynamics into the material. The music is reminiscent of the free
years between the late 1960s and early 1970s, when categories didn't matter for a while. Somehow Lily of the Nile is a futuristic jazz-rock album.

LIUN + The Science Fiction Band bubbles over with fantastic ideas and rearrangements and thus passes as a completely independent album. Unlike many musicians from the modern jazz scene, Cadotsch and Slavin mostly write together in a studio in the woods outside Berlin. This environment makes you think more freely. I am very curious about the live realization! The previous performances of LIUN + The Science Fiction Band have already created some magical moments.

What singer Lucia Cadotsch had to offer with Liun & The Science Fiction Orchestra were fine arranging, contemporary sounds and a colourful bouquet of impressions and timbres.

She’s piloting a rolls and she knows it

Simple melodies and themes are charged with tension, pressure and sounds by the Berlin quintet Liun & The Science Fiction Band: science fiction with a retro aspect.

Keine leichte Kost, aber: uneingeschränkt wow – ganz wie jede Nicht-gesucht-aber-gefunden-Geschichte eben auch enden kann, mehr noch: enden muss.

Lucia Cadotsch n’en finit pas de marquer un territoire personnel très défini, et ses accointances artistiques sont des plus prometteuses. (…) Et le flair d’avoir su, très tôt, exploiter l’alchimie tout particulière de la paire Sandsjö-Eldh pour porter ses mots fait montre d’une intelligence opportune à saluer.

Speak Low II not only captures Cadotsch’s spiritual yet calming vocal tones in full bloom but brings a sense of fluid improvisation in the form of her band consisting of two Swedes, Otis Sandsjö (tenor saxophone) and Petter Eldh (double bass.). Improvisation may suggest a record that’s hard to get close to, but what makes Speak Low II special is the accessibility the trio bring to these takes, stretching the songs into new shapes but never blunting their immediacy or reach.

On this year’s strongest vocal jazz album, Swiss singer Lucia Cadotsch and her Swedish trio take apart the standards to see what they’re made of – and make a convincing case for new songs to be added to the canon.

Eerily beautiful whispers.

Cadotsch’s treatments, and her translucent, incantatory voice work, evoke that more readily than anything more exuberant. And yes, there is strenuous effort, perhaps, to be distinctive. [...] each cut carries such deep conviction it comes across in the moment as the only possible interpretation. They work, because there is keen intelligence here, applied by everyone in the service of the song.

For the second time (after Speak Low) the fantastic trio hits the charts again. The standards are chopped to the bone, the almost circular breathing of Otis Sandsjö's saxophone dampens the bounces of Petter Eldh's bass and lets Lucia Cadotsch's voice set the lyrics in balance, between singing and whispering. Wonderful.

Modern, traditional, avant-garde and old-school all at once, Speak Low II seems to dig into a musical bag without a bottom and comes up with all of its contents, carefully assembled to form a refined and musically complete whole.

Als die Sängerin Lucia Cadotsch vor fünf Jahren ihr Trio-Album „Speak Low“ vorlegte, war die Jazzwelt verblüfft. Soviel Direktheit, Schönheit und Intensität auf einmal hatte man lange nicht gehört. Nun gibt es den zweiten Streich auf dem Lucia Cadotsch ihre Band noch erweitert hat.

*** 5/5 ***
Lucia Cadotsch has a mesmerizing, hypnotic voice.

Atemloses wechselt sich mit luftigen, manches Mal richtiggehend zutraulichen Melodien ab, denen man gern mehr Zeit zum Nachklingen lassen würde. Gen Ende der Platte scheint man tödlich erschöpft von der eigenen Eruption: Keine leichte Kost, aber: uneingeschränkt wow.

“Die Attraktion der Standards-Bearbeitungen dieses Trios liegt in der geradezu plakativen Rollenzuweisung. Lucia Cadotsch hält die Verbindung zu den Vorlagen, sie agiert quasi als anchorwoman, um sie herum diffundiert vieles in andere Räume.”

Lucia Cadotsch is an exceptional talent and while she excels on anything she turns her hand to - see also her 'Time Rewind' album with the Science Fiction Band - there's a real magic with Cadotsch, Eldh and Sandsjö, and 'Speak Low II' absolutely serves as a further triumph for all concerned.

The minimalistic approach makes the music on Speak Low II so fascinating.

Speak Low II foregrounds Cadotsch’s crystal-clear lyricism more than its predecessor without ever cramping the freedoms of her classy improvising partners. She brings a graceful accessibility to a personal and ingeniously offbeat setup.

Tripping a light fantastic across a curious and congruous selection of covers and standards, two of We Jazz’s (sort of) house band members, Otis Sandsjo (of Y-OTIS reconstructive hip-hop jazz fame) and Peter Eldh (of the masterful Koma Saxo), once more join forces with the amorphous voiced Lucia Cadotsch to re-shape the unfamiliar familiar under the umbrella of the Berlin-based Swiss singer’s Speak Low Trio.

Sie hat dem Jazzgesang neuen Atem eingehaucht und experimentiert ständig weiter.

“Azure” Music Video of the Day
Speak Low II takes up the baton from where their genre-bending and forward-looking debut album left off, with new tonal colours to the band's sonic palette, while still accentuating the stark, haunting beauty of the songs they explore.

"Every time I’ve seen them, I’ve been struck by the way they gradually draw an audience into the spell of their music. Sandsjö uses circular breathing and false fingerings to create skeins of feathery-toned notes that can function either as an obligato or a countervoice, while Eldh deploys the combination of strength and mobility that make him one of the most compelling of all current bassists."

Your album is sooooo killing. Extra extra good. I love it. Congrats, for me it’s an instant classic.

Cadotsch Killing It Softly At Umea
„Speak Low sustains its discreetly charming creative growth by way of covers of anybody from Rickie Lee Jones and Randy Newman to Duke Ellington.The contrast between the precisely contained yet deeply expressive delivery of the leader and the focused turbulence the horn and bass create around her is engrossing.“