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PEAKS & PLOTS  / UNIT Records / RD: May 29th, 2026

DON’T FORGET TO PAY YOUR BILLS
(comp./lyrics Christina Fuchs 10/2025)
Moritz Wesp: tb, Eva Pöpplein: elec

LE CHAMP (comp./lyrics Caroline Thon 10/2025)
Evi Filippou: vib, Eva Pöpplein: elec, Zuzana Leharová: vl, Matthias Schuller: tb

CAPRICORN & ARIES (comp. Christina Fuchs 10/2025)
Evi Filippou: vib, Zuzana Leharová: vl, Julian Drach: ss, Matthias Bergmann: flh

SAVITA (comp./lyrics Caroline Thon 07/2025)
Roger Hanschel: sso, Filippa Gojo: voc, Eva Pöpplein: elec, Kira Linn: bars

TAKSIM (comp. Christina Fuchs 8/2025)
Eva Pöpplein: elec, Evi Filippou: vib/perc, Laia Genc: p, Filippa Gojo: voc,
Zuzana Leharová: vl, John-Dennis Renken: tp, Jens Düppe: dr

RECIPROCITY (comp. Evi Filippou, arr. Caroline Thon 10/2025)
Evi Filippou: vib, Andreas Wahl: guit

LAI NAIRS (comp. Christina Fuchs 10/2024)
Evi Filippou: vib/perc/stones, Eva Pöpplein: elec, Jens Düppe: dr,
Alex Morsey: b, Veit Lange: ts, Lennard Stünkel: tb, Andreas Wahl: guit

“FUCHSTHONE ORCHESTRA – PEAKS & PLOTS:
Fuchsthone’s new album, this time featuring Greek vibraphonist and percussionist Evi Filippou as guest soloist with the orchestra.

“Peaks” are the deeply experienced encounters and experiences of the year 2025, musically translated by the two composers into “Plots,” their personal storylines and narratives. Like “Savita,” composed by Caroline Thon and dedicated to the young German Ukraine aid worker Diana “Savita” Wagner, who described the horrors of the war in her touching frontline blog diary and lost her life during her aid mission. Or in “Taksim” by Christina Fuchs, with field recordings from Istanbul, the chants of the muezzin and street noises as the overall soundscape of the city. It was also created during a period of political unrest when she was staying there during an artist residency. “Taksim” is the name of the central square, but it also means, beyond the location, “musical improvisation”.
Or in the intense composition “Le Champ” by Caroline Thon, based on the field theory of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as an appeal for a more equitable distribution of resources. According to Thon, some passages have the aggressive energy of rock music, combined with electronic minimal music, the element of words as sound, and the metallic-melodic soundscapes of Evi Filippou’s vibraphone. When composing, she also follows Bela Bartók’s theory of developing a complex musical work from a single compositional cell through continuous variation.
Christina Fuchs describes her compositional practice as a search for sound and expansion. Starting with rhythm, she develops compositional sketches that become fragments of sound collages. Layers that overlap and intertwine like events. “Every chord has a verticality for me,” she explains. Caroline Thon begins with a melodic idea that expands into an overall composition, incorporating layers of tension.
Always with the aim of taking an artistic stance on socio-political issues and continuously expanding and deepening her compositional spectrum in terms of sound. Fuchs and Thon work with dense rhythmic and melodic textures of knitted sound structures, electronics, and live sampling by computer musician and sound artist Eva Pöpplein, which they combine with big band brass sections, violin, and vocals to create a total work of art.
Expanding and transcending genre boundaries, virtuoso brass sections dive into emerging noise areas, from which solos and improvisational inner surfaces detach themselves, slowing down to a whisper, only to return to a large-scale soundscape. A dynamic of silence and the energy of explosive, brutal tutti. Masterfully lead by the two conductors, as a tonal narrative and exploration of form and material, of “Peaks & Plots”.

Check out the CD booklett: