Inner Spaces is a duo project from trumpeter-composer Amir ElSaffar and sound artist Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch — two artists for whom microtone is mother tongue and silence is material. ElSaffar moves between trumpet, voice, and santur, drawing on the Iraqi maqam tradition alongside the language of contemporary jazz. Bianchi Hoesch surrounds and transforms this acoustic presence with live electronics, building immersive sonic environments in real time. Together they have developed a modular, collaborative form that weaves electroacoustic landscapes, maqam, microtonal harmony, and open improvisation into a continuous, breathing whole. Their album Inner Spaces (Maqam Records / Ornithology Productions) has received four-star praise from DownBeat, Songlines, and Jazz Journal, with reviewers describing a music that is at once "spiritually ancient" and rigorously forward-looking — a "sonic laboratory" and a "mercurial slice of ambient jazz" rooted in a shared Iraqi maqam. In concert, the duo extends the recorded work outward: the room becomes part of the instrument, and each performance finds its own shape through flexible structures and improvisatory space. This is music that does not move quickly. It asks to be inhabited — heard with the full body, not just the ears.
