There is a woodwind instrument, built from ten modular double-pipes and finished on a 3D printer, sitting somewhere in the workroom Mat Muntz and Vicente Hansen Atria use in New York. It splits the octave into thirty-one parts rather than twelve. They call it the micro-aulus, after the double-piped aulos of ancient Greece, and they built it because the standard tuning systems of Western music didn't have room for what they wanted to hear.
Muntz and Atria met years before The Vex Collection existed, playing together in a trio called Brickwork with Xavier Del Castillo. It was there, working almost by accident in 24-tone equal temperament, that Muntz wrote his first microtonal piece. “The mere knowledge that there was this entire alternative system out there made me open my ears to new possibilities,” he has said of the discovery.
The duo's self-titled debut, released on Carrier Records on 18 February 2022, is what happened when that curiosity was let loose on instruments most jazz records never go near. Muntz plays bass and the primorski meh, a Croatian bagpipe he has studied since 2018 whose tuning system sits outside any regional map — not European, not Balkan, not Middle Eastern. Atria, born in Chile, composes and plays drums, gongs and electronics.
They brought in help. The Korean woodwind player gamin contributes piri and taepyeongso; the avant-garde Highland piper Matthew Welch adds his own untempered drone; a third guest, credited only as Neo, plays the carnyx, the bombard and the dozaleh.
None of it reads as novelty.
Muntz has called the record's best microtonal moments accidents — the primorski meh's placeless tuning, and gamin's piri sliding into it “as if these instruments were meant to play together.” The Guardian heard “ecstatic punky improvisations filled with wild, distorted energy”; the clarinettist Kinan Azmeh, whose own work draws on Syrian and Western traditions, called it “contemporary music inspired by a multitude of traditions without being limited by any” — as good a description as any of a record that treats the double reed, one of the oldest musical technologies on the planet, as unfinished business rather than folklore.
Both musicians came up through early-career programmes at The Shed before building the solo catalogues that now run alongside this one. Muntz's Phantom Islands has picked up a Deutscher Jazzpreis nomination for international debut album; Atria's Orlando Furioso earned a nod from the New York Times for its “punchy, creative force.” The Vex Collection is where their instincts collide hardest — two composers who ended up building their own instruments because nothing on the market would let them finish the sentence they were trying to say.
