Classical Music 157 Items

When a synth master like Steve Moore joins forces with the legendary KPM, magic must materialise. And so it does with Analog Sensitivity: cinematic, enigmatic synthscapes to both haunt and heal. New York-based multi-instrumentalist/producer/film composer Steve Moore is probably best known for his synthesizer and bass guitar work as Zombi, together with Anthony Paterra. But he is also part of Miracle and Titan as well as being a prolific solo artist releasing music as Gianni Rossi, Lovelock and under his own name. The story of Analog Sensitivity starts with those soundtracks, or more specifically the time in between them. Rather than being commissioned by KPM, this LP comes from music Steve was recording sporadically and tinkering with for over three years during the downtime between his film projects. There were no ideas about what it was nor a plan for how it would be released, or even if it was going to be released at all. However, after Jon Tye invited him to play on the Ocean Moon project for KPM Steve realised that the hallowed library label might be the perfect home for what he had been working on. The people at KPM agreed. Finishing production in late 2019 in Albany, NY, he came up with the track sequencing and suddenly, he had an album: Analog Sensitivity.

Limited Edition Cloudy Clear Vinyl.Combining Processed Recordings Of Wind And Water With Analog Synthesizers And Chamber Orchestra, Elori Kramer's The Blue Of Distance Is An Audio Dissertation On The Role Technology Plays In Our Relationships To Geography And Nature, Unspoolinginto An Examination Of Memory And Longing Across Seven Sections That Layer Filmic Minimalism Over Churning Electronic Soundbeds. Half Of The Suite Was Written In The Adirondack Mountains During Summer Amid Lakes, Rivers, And Moss-Ladenforest Floors, While The Other Half Was Conceived On A Frozen Lake Superior Island In Deep Winter, Creating A Subtextual Dialogue Between The Two Extreme Settings. Kramer, Who Was Born In 1990 And Grew Up Alongside The Internet, Uses Her Musicto Explore Nature In The Actual And The Virtual World, Through Direct Experience And Facsimile Alike, Focussing And Blurring The Line Between The Two. "Looking Back At My Videos Of That Summer-- Which Is Where The Processed Audio Came From-- I Triedto Remember What It Had Felt Like To Be There," She Recalls, "Thinking About Questions Of Reality Versus Imagination; Physical Versus Digital; And The Ways In Which Memory Shifts Through Our Minds And Technology." The Title The Blue Ofdistance Was Derived From Rebecca Solnit's Book A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Referring To The Phenomenon Of Faraway Mountains Appearing Blue Due To Light Particles Getting Lost Over Distance. "If We Were To Go Up To The Mountains Thatappear Blue From Far Away, We Would See That They Weren't Actually That Color." She Says. "This Beauty Is Made Possible Because Of Their Distance," Much In The Same Way That The Splendor Of A Lush Season Is Only Fully Realized In The Throes Of A Bleak One, And The Joy Of An Event Can Only Be Felt When It Has Long Since Been Consigned To Remembrance.R.I.Y.L Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Josiah Steinbrick, Emily Sprague

»In June 2017, I was due to perform in Moscow when I met Kirill Gilels, the grandson of the famous pianist Emil Gilels. He listened to what our Phoenix Mastering® restoration process, can achieve, and made the decision to entrust us with the results of several years of research: he gave us a list of dates and places of the previously unreleased recordings of his grandfather. In Berlin, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, we came across a treasure trove, stunning in terms of both the quality and consistency of Emil Gilels’s playing. We were fully aware that he was one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. It was in Amsterdam where at last, we succeeded in extracting this fabulous recital from 1976 at the Concertgebouw – recordings that had fallen into oblivion. We were allotted a studio where we listened to the tapes one by one, we did not utter a word, so overcome were we by the beauty of what we heard.« (F. D’Oria-Nicolas) Considered one of the most important pianists of the twentieth century, he was a pupil of H. Neuhaus. He wins the current Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels and takes on an international stature. In 1955, he was the first artist to be welcomed in the United States since the war: if the public, somewhat circumspect of Carnegie Hall, in New York, accompanies his entry on stage of a troubled silence, it is under a thunder of uninterrupted applause that he will refuse to leave the stage!

Moby’s eclectic career has cast him in the roles of electronic dance music pioneer, singer and songwriter, producer, activist, and restaurateur, but for his latest venture he presents his music in a whole new light. Together with Deutsche Grammophon, he is releasing an album of some of his best known tracks in stunning new arrangements for classical instruments – featuring Moby himself and a stellar lineup of collaborators from across the musical spectrum.

Though it was as a creator of dance music that he found fame in the 1990s, Moby’s music has never been easy to pigeonhole – his 1999 smash hit album Play, for instance, drew heavily on samples from Alan Lomax’s archive of field recordings. On this newly announced album, to be released on 26 March 2021, classic Moby songs including “Porcelain”, “Why Does My Heart”, and “Extreme Ways” will be released in innovative new versions. The album concludes with a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”.

Always a daring and imaginative thinker, Moby’s first classical collaboration came in October 2018, when he performed a selection of his songs alongside the LA Phil and conductor Gustavo Dudamel. This was the inspiration for the current project, which features not only full orchestral versions but new electronic arrangements, as well as sophisticated smaller-scale acoustic interpretations.

The 14-track album features some eye-catching collaborations including both Jim James (My Morning Jacket) and the acclaimed classical pianist Víkingur Ólafsson on “Porcelain”; Gregory Porter and Amythyst Kiah on “Natural Blues”; and Kris Kristofferson as well as original vocalist Mark Lanegan on “The Lonely Night”.

Piano Day 2021 sees Nils Frahm surprise the world with his Erased Tapes debut. Wait, what? How? Anyone who has seen the trail blazing sonic pioneer live will know Nils likes to deadpan a joke. Graz is in fact the first studio album he recorded for the label back in 2009, that somehow remained a secret… until now. Nils Frahm has quietly changed the musical landscape, reincarnating the centuries old figure of a pianist-composer for a new generation of music fans. As Nils’ word-of-mouth popularity grew and grew, so did the pop-culture profile of his instrument. He founded Piano Day with a team of like-minded friends in 2015 to help that process, some years releasing an album of piano recordings to celebrate one of humankind’s greatest inventions. Graz is one such record; an unheard snapshot of a young Nils recorded at Mumuth, the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, in 2009 as part of the thesis Conversations for Piano and Room produced by Thomas Geiger, which received an award in the Classical Surround Recording category at the 127th AES Convention in New York. Whilst at the time it was decided to keep the grand piano recordings from the Graz sessions locked away and instead focus on his close mic’ed, dampened piano explorations which would become his acclaimed studio album Felt in 2011, two of the pieces — most notably Hammers — lived on as part of his live set, and were expanded on and re-recorded as part of his breakthrough 2013 record Spaces (a collage of field recordings from concerts which broke the Fourth Wall and included audience coughs). Over his mercurial career, Nils has pushed and pulled at the boundaries and parameters of his prolific work like that. He’s physically changed his piano (the softened prepared strings of Felt) played with a modified body (Screws recorded with 9 fingers and a broken thumb) played with scale (Solo recorded on the 3.7 metre high Klavins M370) and with the different layers of formats (last year’s Tripping with Nils Frahm nested his studio setup inside a live performance, concert film and live album). Now with Graz he has found the final frontier for play: time itself and his own discography. Graz is a moment of time at the very beginning of Nils’ quiet revolution. The essential genius is already evident; the harmonic language of classical, and the immediacy of jazz. Nils seems to pull down each idea moment by moment, gently, to not scare away the muse. He describes: “sometimes when you hear a piano, you might think it’s a conversation between a woman and a man. At the same time, it can hint at shapes of the universe and describe how a black hole looks. You can make

Fantas is the epic opening track on Caterina Barbieri’s acclaimed 2019 release Ecstatic Computation. The original Fantas laid out a magical path of patterns leading the listener on a journey into the sound itself. Fantas Variations maps out eight new potentials sprung from this initial path as constructed by a diverse mix of artists lending to a wide spectrum of new works extrapolated from the original work. For this project Barbieri invited friends and long time collaborators from a variety of musical backgrounds to create a more sustainable and inclusive landscape in terms of stylistic, geographical, gender and generational balance. The results are a diverse array of approaches and instrumentation which blur the boundaries between the acoustic and electronic.

Fantas Variations embraces a platform for mutual exchange and support between like-minded artists, where active and collective re-imagination is prioritised over the traditional model of remixes, which is often strategic, functional and more passive.

Longtime friend and collaborator Kali Malone rearranged Fantas to a slowed-down, austere and eerie version for two Organs. Evelyn Saylor created a piece for a vocal ensemble consisting of her, Lyra Pramuk, Stine Janvin and Annie Garlid, joining forces to express the choral, psychedelic and vitalistic nature of the piece. Barbieri’s former guitar professor at the Conservatory in Bologna, Walter Zanetti, composes Fantas for electric guitar, by translating every single gesture of the original electronic piece into a personal, nuanced and detailed interpretation. Bendik Giske’s reinterpretation for Saxophone and Voice captures the atmospheric essence of Fantas and its psychic meteorology. Longtime collaborator and along with Barbieri the other half of the outfit Punctum, Carlo Maria, resynthesizes Fantas for Tr808 and Mc202, bringing a more club-oriented dimension of the piece to life whilst unveiling the sonic continuum between rhythm and pitch through a sensitive timbral approach. Jay Mitta’s Singeli reinterpretation of Fantas transpires with pitched-up percussion and turbo-fast polyrhythmic patterns unleashing the frenetic, shifting, transformative matter within the piece to a higher plain of euphoric dance. Baseck’s variation is a rave fantasia, where the prismatic trance of the original is channeled into fierce, uncompromising hardcore, whilst Kara-Lis Coverdale’s take is a phantasmagoria for piano that gently, yet inexorably, captures the relentlessness chimerical qualities of the original, unveiling its spectral backbone.

Post-punk/new wave hero Ann Margaret Hogan’s second album of solo piano and field recordings for Downwards is a box of subtle wonders, mastered by Veronica Vasicka and highly recommended if yr into Satie, Virginia Astley, Sarah Davachi. A weight of history flows through Hogan’s keys with a stark intimacy, beautifully illuminated by naturally effortless, quietly grand songwriting. It’s a direct continuation of the landscaped themes and atavism of 2020’s ‘Honeysuckle Burials’ and the ‘Reversing Into Tomorrow’ collaboration with Karl O’Connor, vividly capturing the slow passage of time in a way that has quite literally compelled us to stop the relentless mind-grind for its 40 minute duration on more than one occasion. After previous fixations on the iron age forts and burial mounds of the Clywdian Range in North Wales, Hogan transmutes the scenery of her more immediate locale, Oxton on The Wirral - from the cadence of its red sandstone landmark Thor’s Rock, to memories of its boating lake, for example - into a quiet yet ravishing suite inflected with traces of wildlife and industry recorded on long walks, all subsumed within a deep blue estuarial atmosphere silted by the strange reality of life in the current era, echoing the surreal, sunny period when the album was conceived. A generation on from her pivotal work with spar Marc Almond and likes of Deux Filles and Nick Cave, and forty generations since The Wirral hosted, as she says “a Norse parliament at Thingwall”, Hogan weaves time and place into a reflective, funereal sort of parlour music, turning daily ambulations amid the gorse and under luminous skies into gorgeous, life affirming and intimate self expressions. The eight pieces are mostly improvised and flow with a free, fleeting concision from the palpable warmth of ‘Forgotten Prelude’ and bluesy ache of ‘Fragile Elements’ to more funereal modes in ’Mesto’ and ‘Funeral Cargo’ suggestive of a Viking burial soundtrack. At its core, ‘Wolfswalzer’, a dedication to her one time collaborator and erstwhile Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür - is described by Hogan as “a simple waltz of coffee, food, friends and music”, and ‘Impromptu’ is the album’s slowest, soaked in the feeling of atmospheric immanence that defines the album’s timeless appeal. It’s an unspeakably moving album, words really do it no justice.

Wavy grave rave for better tomorrow.

We no longer present Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski and his music. However, we offer you here to rediscover his work in a easy way with its greatest classics played by the greatest orchestras.

In The Early Months Of 2020, When The Covid-19 Outbreak Ravaged His Home Country Of Italy, Prolific Composer Brunobavota Did What We All Would Eventually Do: Isolated Andwaited. What Followed Was A Year Of Fear, Anxiety, And Dread.Eventually, Fear Gave Way To Fatigue, And The Anxietymetamorphosized Into Nervous Energy. The Compulsion Tocreate Became More Powerful Than The Compression Andweight. And So Were Born Apartment Songs And Apartmentloops.Representing Two Separate But Intersecting Paths Of Bavota'screative Journey, Apartment Songs Is A Suite Of Sparse Soloacoustic Piano Works, While Apartment Loops Are Expansiveexplorations For Synthesizers And Outboard Effects Processors.Though In Theory The Two Sets Should Sound Disconnected Andunrelated - Given Their Disparate Creative Approaches Andinstrumentation - It's Bavota's Uncanny Sense Of Melody Andspace That Easily Unites Them As Two Halves Of A Singularvision.

Volker Bertelmann and Hildur Guðnadóttir hardly need an introduction - their distinct styles have graced the speakers of pretty much anyone enamored with experimental music in the last decade, and between them the two have chalked up an enviable canon of successes. Bertelmann, under the Hauschka moniker has explored the extremities of prepared piano improvisation, and Guðnadóttir has taken cinematic, explorative cello music into a new era of depth and passion, so to hear them both together is a rare and unexpected treat. Rare is putting it lightly even - „Pan Tone“ is a recording of a single concert which the duo performed on the 26th of February 2010 as part of Arctic Circle - Bubbly Blue and Green festival at Kings Place in London, and documents an event that would truly never be repeated. Sure, they could attempt to re-create the event, but the spontaneity and glorious serendipity in this particular recording is a pleasure to behold.

Bertelmann and Guðnadóttir decided to create a set of compositions which based on the idea of the ocean, and took a book of Pantones to extract exact references to the specific colors of the sea. These watery tones form the backbone of the performance and inform the direction of the collaboration, guiding us through rich blues, glassy greens and frothy whites. In listening to the music it seems incredibly appropriate that the artists should choose blue as the middle ground in their work; the ineffable lightness that Bertelmann brings to the table is a stark contrast to Guðnadóttir´s sinking darkness, and as the two styles collide we witness a plethora of tones, shades and hues. It sounds as if the two artists have been playing together for decades, and their sound is so perfectly matched you might wonder why it´s taken them this long to collaborate. All that´s left for us to do is to soak in the tidal beauty of this very exclusive body of music, to listen to it sing, bubble and crash through its duration before settling in total silence. When the record reaches its conclusion there is an unsettling calm, a sense that you have witnessed something very special indeed, and that is a feeling to prize amongst all else.

Toronto keyboardist R. Grunwald has played on sessions for hundreds of musicians, and has served as bandleader for jazz/pop chanteuse Jill Barber and country/folk songwriter Donovan Woods for the better part of a decade. Now he's ready to step onto the public stage with his own music'alone. Oma is an evocative and deeply personal solo piano record, inspired in part by the life story of his 96-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and pianist. Drawing from Erik Satie, Nils Frahm and others, Grunwald refers to his intensely melodic compositions as 'extended minimalism.'

'After quitting piano, it was my Oma who inspired me to get back into it. She survived the 2nd world war moving from town to town, hiding from the Nazis, and the Russians in Poland. Music was the one thing that tied her young life together. This music is a tribute to her.'

Enjoy in a quiet environment.

Melody As Truth present “Melodies In The Sand”, a collection of works from Czech artists Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi. The husband-and-wife duo began working together in the mid 80’s as part of experimental ensemble Capella Antiqua e Moderna, a unique association of musicians whose repertoire spanned various styles of European classical music. With an inventive and unorthodox approach to both historical and modern compositional techniques and interpretive procedures, the Havel’s have steadfastly developed a unique and musically autonomous language which continues to expand to this day. Spanning their early work in Capella Antique e Moderna to recent pieces recorded for Viola De Gamba, ‘Melodies In The Sand’ is presented to the listener with the simple aim of shining a light on these incredible musicians. Their work has within it the ability to penetrate and enrich the innermost corners of a perceptive human soul, a gift which they share with sincerity and humbleness.

Tancade is the solo debut by experimental cellist Gaspar Claus. Following on from his previous soundtrack work and a wealth of collaborations (incl. Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, Jim O’Rourke), Claus brings forth a collection of pieces which free the cello from its own limitations. Majestic and adventurous, stormy and radiant, dreamy and rigorous, Tancade defies categorisation, evoking chamber music suspended in the fourth dimension, the soundtrack of an experimental film or the strange folk music of an undiscovered tribe.

Patrick Higgins' new album Tocsin is full of thrilling opposites. It is a masterclass of visceral genre-bending sounds that are physical and delicate at the same time. Over the course of three large compositions, the listener is brought on a journey of constant surprise, as when the sound of violins dissolves into a halo of pure noise, more at home in an underground electronics show than anything that appears on a concert stage. The performers include the Wet Ink Ensemble, hailed as the 'Best Classical Ensemble of 2018'; acclaimed pianist Vicky Chow, 'one of our era's most brilliant pianists,"; and the Mivos Quartet, 'one of America's most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles.

Following on from the hugely popular ‘Klavirni’ (Emika’s first solo piano album in 2015) her second installment of piano solos are a magical cluster of melodies, dreamy effects, obscure production mistakes with tape echo’s and other old analog gear.