"Observed Phenomena" is the debut album from “Saxophone Lab”, a solo sonic research project devoted to the outer edges of saxophone sound, situated within the wider musical universe of celebrated saxophone-based artist and composer Mike Casey (GRAMMYs ‘Next’, nine-time Amazon Pandora Spotify “Best Jazz Of”).
Conceived as a living laboratory rather than a traditional artist identity, it explores extended techniques, breath textures, percussive possibilities, multi-phonics, key noise, microtones, and unstable harmonics as raw musical material to tell stories through the saxophone.
Each “Saxophone Lab” release blurs boundaries between instrumental “new music”, sound design, avant-garde jazz, cinematic contemporary classical, and acoustic abstraction.
The work is intentionally tactile, emphasizing physicality: air through metal, pads against keys, reed against mouthpiece. What emerges is an earthly catalog of raw, living sounds: intimate, volatile, and highly detailed…equally suited for deep listening, pondering life, photography, cinematic videography and transformative sampling. Above all, “Saxophone Lab” is a deeply personal, almost journalistic solo archive of Mike Casey at his most experimental, pushing the saxophone into unconventional sounds to communicate emotions beyond the twelve notes.