It seems like Janek Gwizdala is always a few strides ahead when it comes to his music and marketing. That certainly holds true on his latest, One Way Out, a departure sonically and in delivery method (the record and accompanying documentary is available exclusvely at janekgwizdala.com). The 12-track trio effort features keyboardist Tom Cawley (Peter Gabriel, Ronnie Scott’s House Band) and drummer Nicolas Viccaro (John McLaughlin, Bill Evans), and is almost entirely improvised. But the catalyst for the cinematic, ambient soundscape the three create is Gwizdala’s mammoth effects pedal setup. His painstakingly prepared floor array allows his bass to fly free, taking on multiple roles and visiting other dimensions. We checked in with Janek on the eve of his first tour with the project. What was your vision for this record, considering it was almost entirely improvised? My main goal was for the music to be honest, and that meant not doing anything the same way I’ve done it before. It was also about finding the right musicians who could improvise at a high level, and who I trusted. It’s always a roll of the dice when you go into the studio with almost no music written down. So I wanted to make it a little less risky by hiring Tom and Nico, as well as my engineer, Juan Pablo Alcaro, and our film crew; very important people to me who have been in my life for a long time. I felt that gave me the best chance for success. You say in the accompanying 44-minute film documentary that you only had only a few short phone demos going in to the session. Yes, but only to say, Hey, this is a potential direction we might end up in, sonically, but it’s totally okay if we don’t. We were at the studio—which is in a beautiful 12th Century Spanish castle—for three days, so what you’re hearing is maybe an hour of six hours of recorded material. As soon as everything was set up we started recording, with zero rehearsal time. What was the starting point?    Well, as I say in the film, the fourth member of the band is my insane pedal setup, which is two suitcases with 45 pedals. A lot of it was coming from that. I started manipulating sounds and improvising; looping and sequencing, using pitchy kinds of ambient delays, with the three of us improvising off of those sounds. I had been working on my pedal setup through the pandemic, trying to find new sounds and eventually getting a rough idea of what my signal path was. What was your original connection to Tom and Nico? Tom I’ve known since 1996. We went to school together and he played in my band in the mid-’90s around London. Last summer I found a box of old cassette tapes with bootlegs of that band and it was eye-opening. Here we were kids in our late teens who didn’t know our ass from our elbow but there were a lot of great mo