Arjunamusic HHV Records 9 Items

[2x12”]

GENRE/S: Minimal, Electronic, Ambient, Downtempo

TRACKLISTS:
1_Body Of Lies 2_Scapegoat Principle 3_Forth Density 4_The Banality Of Evil
5_Talking to Nature Spirits 6_Resurrection — Total playing time: 50:04

SHORT INFO:
Samuel Rohrer - drums, percussion, electronics, keys, modular synths
Music produced, recorded and mixed by Samuel Rohrer
Samuel Rohrer’s newest solo album, Codes of Nature, shows the artist making yet more refinements and
additions to an already rich catalog of musical ideas. Though he has excelled in collaborative projects with Ambiq,
Ricardo Villalobos, Max Loderbauer, Tobias Freund, Dark Star Safari, Nils Petter Molvaer, Oren Ambarchi and
many others, it is fascinating to experience him also working in a field completely his own, yet managing to still give
the impression of being fully integrated or connected with a larger musical universe.
A strange, intriguing ambiguity between the specific and the universal is indeed what makes Rohrer’s music
worth playing on a loop – the cool, downtempo, yet energized constructions on Codes are powered by subtle
atmospheric and tonal changes, and work like a camouflage adaptable to any environment.
This is a record whose strength derives from its versatility. It’s clear that this versatility of sounds has been
inspired by a commitment to positive differentiation that is not just a musical one, and that’s where this work will
inspire others in turn.

LP

GENRE/S: Jazz, Experimental

TRACKLISTS:
A1 Garden Of Silence A2 Dare To Dance A3 On Second Thought A4 Ways Of Paradox
A5 Now That We Finally Met - B6 Refraction of Glass B7 Concentric B8 Nostalgia
B9 Gravity Inn B10 Where We Go From Here — Total playing time: 47:55

SHORT INFO:
Klaus Gesing bass clarinet, soprano sax, effects?
Björn Meyer electric bass, effects ?
Samuel Rohrer drums, electronics, mod.synths

The trio Amiira of Klaus Gesing, Björn Meyer and Samuel Rohrer has returned after a layoff of
six years since their debut LP. It would be unwise to expect for them to pick up exactly where they left
off, given all the turbulent change that the world has encountered since this time, and indeed the new
Album Curious Objects reflects a clear expansion of the players’ abilities. The fundamentals that guided the
debut album – spatiality, refined coolness, the non-verbal “narrative” quality - are still very much present,
but are this time reinforced with an even more pronounced feeling of communicating across wide
physical and conceptual spaces.
Altogether, Curious Objects is a potent antidote for spiritual and musical fatigue; especially
recommended for those who have already left behind the limitations posed by genres. It is more than the
sum of its parts, and its crossing of numerous different boundaries never feels like the goal in and of
itself: instead, all this activity feels like a tool for unlocking and decoding even more supposedly
irreconcilable qualities and ideas.

A download code is included. With his Arjunamusic label and a growing catalog of category-defying releases, Samuel Rohrer continues to quietly, yet confidently, make a name for himself as a genuinely unique figure within the European electronic music realm. Over the past decade he has assembled a repertoire of music that fills a sadly neglected gap in the modern musical landscape. That is to say, he has made a number of “electronically”-aided works that never seem to make “electronic-ism” the main selling point or raison d'être. Rohrer understands that we inhabit a networked media landscape that no longer sees a novelty value in every synthetic or technological sound, and by realizing this, he makes a music that fully engages with the present without completely disregarding the exciting speculative sensibility that has allowed electronic music to solidify into a tradition. His latest solo album, Hungry Ghosts, again shows the high quality of sonic design that can be achieved by conceptualizing musical passages as living, breathing entities rather than as signposts to some still distant reality. Maybe more so than any of Rohrer’s solo records to date, Hungry Ghosts is the one that most unambiguously displays the artist as a kind of inspired sound “cultivator” or landscaper rather than just a straightforward “producer”. The emphasis here seems to be biological growth processes rendered in musical form, and in fact some track titles namechecking the biodiversity of the external world (“Slow Fox”, “Ctenophora”) and neurochemistry (“Serotonin”) lend some additional credence to this interpretation. As with previous outings, Rohrer starts with his skills as a genre-resistant percussionist and builds from there, with dense clusters of drum hits and icy cymbal exclamations leading the way into a wide-open atmosphere full of fragmented phrases, marked with strange reversals or compressions of time. The percussive portions and other ambiences merge together in such a way that the latter seems like a kind of shifting, holographic camouflage for the former; an effect which makes for a greater than usual number of shifts in mood. Rohrer’s already established ambiguity and mystery are the moods that permeate throughout, to be sure, but there are also surprising moments of humorous whimsy (the flourishes of cartoon mischief and teasing silences on the tracks “Human Regression” and “Bodylanguage”), reverence (the optimistic organ swells d steady sequencer guiding “Ceremonism”), and meditative focus (the slow-motion spectral waltz of “Treehouse”). Also notable here are very brief etudes, such as “Window Pain,” whose dark, lush ebb and flow actually seem tailored to repeated or looped listening. It’s particularly remarkable that almost all of this material is recorded solo and in a “live / no overdubs” mode, given how much it feels like well-rehearsed ensemble playing, and given the impeccable timing involved in continually exchanging the sounds at the very forefront of the mix. And here we come full circle to the idea of “electronic music” mentioned at the beginning here: instead of making us feel that we are in the presence of some fully-realized form brought back from “the future,” Rohrer invites us instead to witness fascinating processes of transition and mutation, and to value them for what they are now as much as for where they are headed.

The Ricardo Villalobos / Samuel Rohrer partnership has yielded increasingly interesting results over the past few years, with the former’s remixes of the latter’s trio Ambiq being supplemented by further reinterpretations of Rohrer’s solo work and live meetings at select events like Berlin’s Funkhaus and Radialsystem V. As should be the case with any strong collaboration, this partnership has been based on mutual challenge rather than compromise, seeing each participant shuttle key technical and emotive aspects of the other’s work to previously unexpected places.

Dark Star Safari is a musical entity comprised of Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Eivind Aarset, Samuel Rohrer and John Derek Bishop. Their second fulllength offering Walk Through Lightly is the first to feature all five musicians together in the studio from the outset, making for a more organic refinement upon their already established methodology: gradually sculpting distinct songs out of collective improvisations, or using the raw material from initial recordings as the basis for more carefully articulated compositions. The final mix is one that invites few stylistic comparisons to other musical peers, and in fact few comparisons to existing genres. Though this second offering from the project is frosted over with a Scandinavian sense of spatiality and melancholy, it’s best listened to without considering any origin points, geographic or otherwise: from the opening moments of “Walk Through Lightly,” listeners will feel as if teleported directly into the middle of an enigmatic film-in-progress. The album opener immediately and successfully sets the table for what is to follow. The electronic and acoustic instrumentation is pensive, but not passive, with restrained scrapes and stridulations in the background combining with backwards-looped passages and perlescent or granulated sound effects to better emphasize the carefully arranged latticework of guitar, percussion, strings, and bass.

Sun Electric, the Berlin-based electronic music duo of Tom Thiel and Max Loderbauer, were
among the pioneers of “live” electronica presentation in the early 1990s, when options for realtime reproduction of one’s sound were a fraction of what we enjoy today. Perhaps a spiritual
successor to earlier forms of “kosmische” music, which saw the exploration of outer and inner
space as being equally worthwhile undertakings, Sun Electric’s music was expansive, epic, and
involving in a way that prioritized the communion between sounds and listeners over the public
exposition of the musicians’ personalities. Space was, of course, utilized as an instrument unto
itself: a fact that is evident in this new release of a notable 1996 set in which Sun Electric
performed at the neo-Gothic Votivkirche in Vienna. Over 75 minutes of performance time, the
duo took full advantage of the 20-second reverb decay time offered by the space.
The real star here remains the way in which the interdependent musical objects move through
open space and mutually evolve with it, and the percussive impacts are part of a “sonic
democracy”, standing on an equal footing with the glistening effects and the lapping waves of
sequenced melody. It’s the consistent application of these strengths which allows the music of
Sun Electric not to be a “nostalgic trip” to a simpler time, but very much a part of the musical
dialogue of the present.

Producer Tom Thiel has worked in the medium of electronic music since the 1980s, been active in the musical epicenter of Berlin since 1987 and with the Sun Electric duo, he was already at the forefront of live / “real time” electronica since the 1990s. Incidentally, Sun Electric are set to release an archival live set from this period on Arjunamusic later this year. Though not everyone becomes exceptional on the basis of “veteran” status alone, Thiel’s latest work shows that he has made good on one of the main promises held out by electronic music and sound synthesis: namely, that it would also provide unexpected, novel, highly individualized syntheses of different attitudes, atmospheres, and affects. This is happily the case with Thiel’s new Arjunamusic release (his first full solo outing since his eponymous 2011 album): it’s a series of colorful, self-contained vignettes that are perceptibly drawn from an eclectic pool of personal experiences and insights. Like similarly successful musical projects, Thiel’s “Album” utilizes all of the above strengths to craft a rewarding listen in its own right, but also to spark curiosity about what other as-of-yet unrealized fusions may be waiting ahead.

CD

2. GENRE/S: Jazz, Experimental

3. TRACKLISTS:
1_The House Behind 2_Loosing Memory 3_City People
4_Concerning the Ice 5_Passing Wind 6_Head/Heart 7_From Below 8_Lost Small Things
9_Smoke Signals

4. SHORT INFO:
Joao Paulo Esteves da Silva piano?
Mário Franco double bass?
Samuel Rohrer percussion
Arjunamusic Records presents the new album The River, from the trio of João Paulo Esteves da
Silva, Mário Franco and Samuel Rohrer, following on the aesthetic developed on their previous release
Brightbird from 2017: it is characterized by meaningful pauses and clever subtractions, but it is also a
strong and mature demonstration of the fruitful partnership that exists between them and more
undeniably perceptible musical features. The group’s willingness to consider the value of the spaces
between the notes (and their understanding that reflection and contemplation upon those spaces is an act
of engagement rather than detachment) is one immediately recognizable feature of their sonic terrain.
However, it’s far from the only one.
In the final estimation, the dialogue between the perceptible and the imperceptible works as well as it
does here because an aesthetic of mutual exchange is central to these musicians’ playing styles. It is rare to
ARTIST: João Paulo Esteves da Silva Trio
w/ Mário Franco & Samuel Rohrer
TITLE: The River
LABEL: Arjunamusic Records!
hear albums in which the gestalt can be comprehended rather than voluntarily or involuntarily zooming in
on a single player or aspect of the presentation; the trio here has created something that can be
appreciated in its totality and which challenges listeners to apply its qualities to other areas of lived
experience.