Driving By Numbers" is already the eighth album by Hamburg-based band HALMA. The four musicians Fiona McKenzie (drums), Andreas Voss (baritone guitar), Gundi Voigt (bass)and Thorsten Carstens (guitar) get straight down to business on the first track of this instrumental longplayer: The sound structure grinds and flies - it's impossible to immediately find your way through this surging abundance of the audible and the conceivable: You have to start again, begin again, in order to grasp the complex construction and artistic wit of this music. Sounds and rhythm play hare and hedgehog with each other: catapult starts, accelerations, delays, fades in and out. The variety makes it clear that the band's focus lies in the unknown: What can be heard works like the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel's forest - the associatively assembled improvisations lead through ups and downs and ravines and valleys to the goal after all: and back to the beginning - like the pins with which insects are fixed in the display case - escaped from time..