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There are organs, and then there are weather systems disguised as instruments. “Wind Dynamic Organ, One & Two” belongs firmly to the second category. Zimoun – artist, sculptor of sound, and long-time engineer of situations where matter learns to vibrate – returns to 12k with two long pieces that feel less played than inhabited. This is not organ music in the liturgical sense, nor in the “press a key, receive a tone” tradition. This is air thinking out loud.

Zimoun’s work has always orbited around simple means and complex consequences: motors, wires, cardboard boxes, springs – systems set in motion and left to negotiate their own behavior. Here the material is nobler, heavier, centuries old, yet radically re-imagined. The Wind Dynamic Organ in the Bern Minster is a research instrument rather than a monument: wind pressure and airflow are continuously malleable, tone is no longer binary, and sound lives in a permanent state of becoming. Notes don’t arrive; they emerge, hesitate, fray at the edges, sometimes dissolve back into breath.

The two pieces – “One” and “Two” – unfold slowly, almost obstinately so, each occupying its own gravity field. Time stretches, but not in the ambient wallpaper sense. This is duration with muscles. Zimoun works the instrument like a sculptor works clay, except the clay keeps inhaling. Swells rise, overlap, and lean into one another; harmonics shimmer like mirages; low frequencies loom with a bodily presence that feels architectural rather than musical. You don’t so much listen as find yourself standing inside the sound, checking whether the walls are still where you left them.

What’s striking is how the organ never settles into grandeur. Despite its scale and ecclesiastical setting, the music resists triumph and avoids spectacle. Instead, it hovers in that ambiguous zone between tone and noise, intention and accident. Air becomes a collaborator with its own agenda. At times you hear something close to a chord; moments later it’s just turbulence, a soft hiss, a trembling threshold where pitch hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. It’s oddly intimate for something so large – like being close enough to hear a building breathe.

There’s also a quiet humor in the premise. An organ that refuses to behave like an organ is a gentle provocation, a reminder that even the most tradition-heavy instruments can be persuaded to misbehave if you treat them less like relics and more like living systems. Zimoun doesn’t impose drama; he allows instability. The result is music that feels calm and slightly unnerving at the same time, serene yet alert, as if silence itself were being slowly kneaded.

Released by 12k – a label long invested in subtle shifts, minimal gestures, and patient listening – “Wind Dynamic Organ, One & Two” fits naturally into a lineage of works that privilege texture over statement. But it also stands apart, anchored in a very specific place, technology, and acoustic reality. The Bern Minster isn’t just a recording venue; it’s an active participant, shaping reverberation into something almost sentient.

In the end, this is not an album that explains itself. It doesn’t narrate, it doesn’t climax, it doesn’t resolve. It simply holds. Air moves. Sound wavers. Time loosens its grip. And somewhere between the pipe and the listener, music remembers that before it was melody, it was breath.