Trafo — German for transformer — is Opek’s fourth album and his most cohesive yet. Recorded live in his Cologne studio by a five-piece band — double bass, Fender Rhodes, alto saxophone, trombone, and Opek on drums — the album transforms personal memories into melodies and observations into sound. It moves through spiritual jazz, rare groove, library music, and 70s film aesthetics without ever fully settling in any one genre. Influences include Wayne Shorter, Soft Machine, David Axelrod, and Marc Moulin’s Placebo. The recording setting — intimate, live, warm — gives each track a breathing quality that studio polish would have erased. A Borges novel in jazz form: not a dream, but an awakening.
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