For over a decade now, the Swiss ensemble District Five has been testing the boundaries of jazz and rock music with a sound that’s slowly evolved over the course of four albums. They describe their latest, last week’s GLUT, as “grunge-jazz,” a spacey musical experiment that mirrors the broad range of subject matter explored in these songs which span from the deeply personal to more sociological and political concerns, including the recent glut of sports gambling apps and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Ahead of the LP’s release, the band stepped into their Rote Fabrik rehearsal space in Zürich to perform the album cut “Strict Circumstances,” a slow-burning meditation on the confluence of the political and the individual. “‘Strict Circumstances’—while being one of our more tender songs (different story played live)—describes a haunted life, a spiraling process kept in motion by contemporary life and its limits,” the band explains of the track they chose to play for “FLOOD Sessions.” “There’s a general loss of meaning, yet a yearning for different futures toward the end.”
Check out the performance below, and stream GLUT here.
