Alpen has been active since 2004, releasing the albums Overdub (2005), The Ongoing Moment (2008) Lost Friends (EP - 2011)and Inside The Sky (June 2011).
Danny Jumpertz, the owner of Sydney label Feral Media, is the creator of the Alpen project. Over the years many of his label mates and musical friends have contributed to Alpen.
Danny focused his energy on Alpen at the time his joint project, Plankton, was in hiatus. Danny’s role in Plankton had been as on-stage producer, an amalgam of ‘playing’ the mixing desk and sampling his band mates in real time.
They released one full-length album, 2003’s acclaimed The Undertone, which was painstakingly recorded and produced by Danny. Forming Alpen provided Danny with a dedicated outlet for his musical ideas and concepts, while leaving the door open for collaborative works too.
Alpen’s debut release Overdub was a collaboration with members of the Sopp Collective, a Sydney-based visual art and design crew. While a handful of musical performances were contributed by label mates from Comatone & Plankton, the musical aspects of Overdub were primarily Danny’s creations. The Feral Media alliance with Sopp (begun with Sopp’s 2003 The Undertone album artwork) produced a stunning stop-motion video for the Alpen single ‘Start Now!’ and the Overdub album artwork and typography.
Sopp’s video for ‘Start Now!’ was selected as one of the best of 2005 and toured with Resfest’s Videos That Rock showcase.
Alpen’s next album, The Ongoing Moment, again involved the Sopp Collective and also was a major musical coming together of many friends. Danny’s idea was to record, mix and master an album over a single weekend, with Sopp and ten other audio-visual practitioners providing the visual inspiration. Danny hand-picked his musical collaborators for their ability to listen and improvise, drawing on members of Underlapper, ii, The Longest Day, Restream, Clairaudience and Morning Stalker.
Although the tracks produced were improvised and mixed quickly, the quality of the creations has encouraged Danny to further explore his idea of ‘rapid composition’. The Ongoing Moment remix project is now in production, whereupon the original participants will have the opportunity to revisit The Ongoing Moment pieces and refashion them at their leisure.
Most of Inside The Sky precedes The Ongoing Moment project, and as such it is the logical sister to 2005’s Overdub. Inside The Sky is an unashamedly studio creation, though many of the tracks origins are ramshackle jams that just ‘clicked’, were (luckily) recorded, then edited and revisited over the years, slowly transforming into new pieces with new found energy.
Significant contributors are Jon Tjhia from ii (on three tracks), frequent collaborator Martin Kirkwood (Splinter Orchestra/Drip Tray/The Sacred Cows) and Greg Seiler (Comatone) who collaborates on one track and also mastered the release.