Sweet Life

Headed home after a wonderful trip to Florence in Italy. This piece reflects my current mood. I met a lot of new people and I took a lot of photos. This music is a spontaneous improvisation. Recorded at my personal recording studio at home. Please enjoy. 

Improvisation_021025_Homebound

lego house- ed sheeran (slower ballad piano)

From the album Sometimes out November 13, 2015 on Western Vinyl.  Vinyl LP format will be out on January 22, 2016.

Pre-order:
CD/LP http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv138
iTunes hyperurl.co/d3h29c
Amazon hyperurl.co/56ffvu

Rare live performance in New York on November 27th at Le Poisson Rouge w/ Lubomyr Melnyk

Golmund:
Label page http://westernvinyl.com/artists/goldmund
Twitter https://twitter.com/Goldmund
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/keith.kenniff
Instagram https://instagram.com/kenniffs/
Artist site http://www.unseen-music.com/

Raised in the rural town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Keith Kenniff aka Goldmund started playing piano at age 20, while studying percussion at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.  Though he may not be a household name, Kenniff's evocative, distinctly American music has become quietly ubiquitous in the past few years, often appearing on NPR, in films, on TV, and in ads for Apple, Facebook, and Google among others.  As an artist who spends a great deal of his time producing music for others, it might be surprising to find out that when he has the opportunity to relax and re-center himself, he often chooses to produce music for himself.  Recorded over the course of three years, the material on his new album Sometimes functions as a journal, documenting brief moments in Kenniff's day when he could turn to the piano as a source of solace and unending creative possibilities.  Kenniff wrote and recorded everything on the album with the exception of the track "A Word I Give", which is a collaboration with preeminent Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who once described Goldmund's music as “…so, so, so beautiful…”.  

Kenniff's pseudonym is taken from the Herman Hesse novel Narcissus and Goldmund in which the Goldmund character leaves the cloister where he was living and studying in search of meaning for his life.  The story resonated with Kenniff when he was searching for a moniker to represent his solo piano work, "I think the way I approached the piano was in the same way: impulsive—searching and feeling things out in the dark."  On Sometimes he continues his explorations in the dark; each of the album's 17 pieces were improvised, and recorded in one or two takes, often late at night, after work-for-hire was finished, and the kids were in bed.  In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Keith Kenniff discussed his appreciation of Civil War era music, and it's ability to covey "…so much story in so few notes."  Similarly, these improvisations manage to be richly evocative despite their technical and compositional simplicity, using subtle details and dynamics to express what might otherwise be inexpressible.  

Throughout Sometimes, Kenniff fully employs the wabi-sabi aesthetic that has always defined Goldmund recordings.  "I like mistakes, I like when things don't go perfectly. I do have a tendency to want for things to be perfect and precise, but I have to also realize that a lot of things I like about music and art are very rough and impulsive, the slight imperfections that give something or someone a unique voice," says Kenniff.  He goes on to explain that these pieces served as a way for him to "step outside of whatever I was doing and return back to a place of discovery very much like when I first started playing."  As we follow him on his path of discovery, we get a glimpse into the world of a young man expressing his myriad feelings and experiences with honesty, and inherently imperfect gestures, which is part of what makes them so relatable and powerful — the local, for a few moments, resonating with the universal. 

Goldmund - "As Old Roads"

From the album Modern Country, out now on Merge Records.

Modern Country

William Tyler "Gone Clear"

Jessica Moss shares an excerpt of a work in progress, recently recorded live in her rehearsal space, that offers a lovely preview of new material to which concertgoers may find themselves treated in 2018 (alongside her debut opus Pools Of Light).

"Untitled 3" displays various techniques and influences that lie at the heart Moss's solo music: building stacked slow-burn string themes through live looping, sampling and pitch-shifting that beautifully balance drone and melody, gradually introduce further electronic, oscillation and synthesis textures, and channel folkways tropes from Eastern Europe and the Middle East – in this case, gesturing towards the Klezmer tradition perhaps most explicitly since her work in the mid-2000s with Black Ox Orkestar.

Jessica Moss
Pools Of Light
http://cstrecords.com/cst124

Jessica Moss • "Untitled #3 (excerpt)"

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/theletdown

‘The Letdown’ is a record better identified by the vibe it creates rather than a particular genre or style. It’s dirty, unapologetically loud and charmingly haphazard. It’s the sort of self-educated, non-jazz record that critics of Moondog would have written off as impure. Frankly, we’re good with that. The strength of the record lies not with any collegiate-level classification, but in its ability conjure moods that just feel good, are instantly familiar and invite a certain nostalgia. The gritty, noir side of it, brings to mind the old black and white detective stories. The jovial, 1920’s romanticism, lends a bit of class and gives the sense that even though everything is falling to shit, we are going to power through it with a bit of song and dance.

Whatever one happens to take away from this album, ‘The Letdown’ is meant to be fun, help the whisky burn just a bit less, and keep the blood flowing. Read into it too much and you might spoil it. Guaranteed it is unlike any Fritch record to date.

The Letdown

Unhinged

William Ryan Fritch - Unhinged (from The Letdown)

J.S. Bach’s French Suites (BWV 812-817) are a curious case. Their history, their compositional intent, even the specifics of their original musical content are surrounded by all kinds of uncertainty. We’re not even sure why or when they began to be referred to as “The French Suites”; there’s nothing particularly “French” about them. (Their constituent movements are pretty much all French dance forms, sure, but that’s also true of the earlier English Suites (BWV 806-811), which are frankly even less English than the French Suites are French.)

Anyway, I thought I knew the French Suites reasonably well until one morning a few months ago when I was walking with my dog along the river (whose resident blackbirds you’ll hear right off the top of this song), listening to Angela Hewitt’s beautiful recording. Her performance of Suite No. 4 in E-flat opens with a Prelude whose grandeur and drama had me feeling both elated and confused: “Aaagh this is the best! I can’t possibly have heard this before and just forgotten about it, right?? Why doesn’t everyone play this??”

Turns out Hewitt’s recording is of a rarely-performed “alternative” version of the suite (hence “BWV 815a”), which contains this prelude, along with an additional Gavotte and a Menuet. Some research revealed that these extra movements are very possibly not by Bach at all, which makes their inclusion in any performance kind of controversial in some circles. (Hewitt’s defense of the practice amounts to “I love them, so I play them”, which is good enough for me!)

Finally, another interesting thing about the Prelude is the notation of its first 18 bars, which are laid out as a series of “unmeasured” block chords, with no precise indication of melody or rhythm, giving it more in common with, say, a Jazz lead sheet (“Here are the chords, get through them however you want”) than with the rest of Bach’s surviving work (although there was plenty of improvisation in Baroque musical performance in general).

I must have been feeling… spicy… that day, because this felt like an invitation. Some piano, some Rhodes, some acoustic guitar, some electric guitar, lots of synthesizers and lots of bowed double bass later, I had this loose take on a loosely-expressed 18 bars of music from the early 18th century. I present it humbly, with endless love and reverence for Mr. Bach and/or whoever actually wrote it.

Bram Gielen - "Prelude, From French Suite No. 4 BWV 815a"

Hello everyone, I would like to show you my new album "Pereehali". This is my third album, it was written and recorded in the summer of 2012. After a long writer's block that was caused by a very pretentious and bombastic second album I decided to make a really intimate, solo-piano work. I lived in the countryside during the recording sessions, and every recording was done by me tête-à-tête with my lovely piano in the wooden house. It was a priceless experience working and writing while having a close contact with nature, it helped me a lot to understand the music I compose, to make it more organic, touching and moving.


playing & recording // dmitry evgrafov 
mixing & mastering // martyn heyne 
cover // vika bogorodskaya 
special thanks to nils frahm & dave howell

Coming Home

Dmitry Evgrafov