The Swiss pianist Christoph Stiefel is a free musician in every sense of the word. Yet, at the beginning of his career, he couldn"t do much with free playing for quite a long time. The new album by Christoph Stiefel"s Inner Language Trio is playfully titled Chutes And Ladders. Behind the allusion to the popular ladder game, especially with children, is a reference to the corona-induced lockdown and its consequences, specifically for musicians. Chutes And Ladders is the second album on which the Swiss musician works with bassist Lukas Traxel and drummer Tobias Backhaus. Isorhythms can also be heard on Chutes And Ladders, but Stiefel focuses more closely on an aspect that has been driving him more and more in the last ten years: his commitment to the ... mehr lesen