Lovely track, really nice string quartet arrangement.

Very lovely ... Can listen all day long . well done 

Good morning Justina, it's beautiful. I miss "Breath" here. It fits perfectly to the valley of Borgomaro in Liguria... 

experiencing sadness as Prayer plays. Greetings Justina.

In the middle of last year I couldn’t stop writing hymns for whatever reason… every piece I wrote sounded like a hymn, every song I wrote was based on hymn-like chord progressions. I suppose it was my own way of playing some peace into the atmosphere when it seemed society was coming apart. It can be hard to know how to respond to things as an artist, but I have a deep belief that creating can bring about its own kind of healing—healing not just for the artist but for those who listen (or watch) as well. 

It’s compositionally my favorite track on the EP—I took a traditional-sounding progression and expanded it into something with a modern-classical flavor. I also just love how insanely creaky and old this one ended up sounding… like one of the dusty, forgotten, and out-of-tune pianos I’ve played in so many churches over the years. It’s also the most fun to play!

Sojourn

An old hymnbook

❤️ Buy Here

Fragmentos

Piano and Viola acoustically recorded. Some lovely Labs tape orchestra and  labs textural pads added.

Sylvan

Belgian composer and sound artist Adriaan Swerts announces the release of his debut full-length album One in collaboration with piano and coffee records – a collection of twelve deeply personal compositions that, originally, were not conceived with the idea of ever getting released but that, like shards of ice, slowly floated together and formed an island of music.

Both a life-threatening accident – which caused his disability –and the passing of his grandfather confronted Adriaan with the fragility of life. Thematically, this album deals with the eternal, life fading away, death, and the afterlife. At the same time, it attempts to celebrate the beauty of love, life, nature and all that lives on earth.

The characteristic sounds on this album are field recordings of natural landscapes Adriaan visited, which he transformed into instruments and used almost solely to compose. The piano and other acoustic instruments such as the harmonium and strings, as old but not forgotten classical friends, are the other elements that accompany these transformed natural sounds. Icelandic glaciers, geysers, Scottish lochs, waterfalls, oceans and more all found a home on this album. In addition, Swerts uses reel-to-reel tape processing to degrade the sound of the recordings and make them sound broken – a reflection of what his body feels like.

The artwork of the album similarly reflects Adriaan's focus on the theme of the fragility of life and nature. The cracks in the ice symbolise how easily something can be broken into pieces – just like what happened to his body after his accident – but can still be a whole. In addition, Adriaan crafted a videoclip for each piece of the album through the process of cymatics – the study of visible sound vibration and the transformational nature of sound and matter. He filmed the sound vibrations caused by his music in water, unveiling beautiful and unique geometric patterns for each composition.

One comes out digitally and on limited edition CD on the 28th of October, featuring artwork and design by Celia Bayo.

Purchase

Adriaan Swerts - Distant Overtones

Boris Rogowski conceived the idea for The Waste Land in the autumn of 2020, when the world became quiet again after a deceptively easygoing summer. During a walk among the “last fingers of leaf” he revisited in his mind the landscape of T.S. Eliot’s enigmatic poem The Waste Land, a somber meditation on disillusionment, nostalgia and isolation in the “modern” world of the early 1920s. It had accompanied Rogowski for many years, and knowing entire passages by heart he found that the strange, tuneful lines had left him with a sort of musical map of the Waste Land. What he heard was a string quartet playing amid a stream of dissolving, permanently mutating sounds, seeking hold, losing it, coming up for air again. The music he envisioned melded contradictions into a cohesive whole, was strange yet universally accessible and – just like Eliot’s poem – an expression both of sorrow for a lost world and hope for a new beginning, deep admiration for classical tradition and disgust at the snobbery and ignorance of an elitist class trying to keep it under lock and key.

The even quieter winter months found Rogowski working long days and nights on the score, putting the music in his head to paper. Also, he quested for the sounds that would be able to represent the stream of synthetic memories that in his vision rolled through the music like the river Thames through the central portion of the poem—and found that they were already there, right in front of him: In the early days of the pandemic he and his friend and studio co-owner Bazzazian had harnessed the halt of everyday life to create a library of sounds that embodied their very own idea of style. For this purpose, they had sent their recordings of acoustic and electronic instruments through a specially devised processing chain, giving them an evocative, strangely timeless quality. It was only logical that those sounds would form the foundation of The Waste Land.

Later, in the spring of 2021, other musicians brought in their unique voices: Moishe Lichtfuss [flute, tenor sax] added his woodwind textures to many of the compositions, most notably on “The Sound of Horns and Motors”. Claus Schulte [drums] made a brief, yet crucial appearance on the centerpiece “The Violet Hour”. At last, the Waste Land String Quartet (Alexander Sachs and Irina Borissova [violins], Anna Krimm [viola] and Michael Preuß [cello]) recorded their parts under the baton of fellow composer David Menke who also played the solo piano on the brooding “In Rats’ Alley”.

The Waste Land is a unique musical cosmos that nonetheless touches upon many reference points, among them the minimalist music of composers like Michael Nyman and Philip Glass, Post Rock of bands like Tortoise or Swans and contemporary Experimental and Ambient works like those of KMRU, Christina Vantzou or Tim Hecker. Like Eliot’s poem, it contains a multitude of voices and fuses them to a music very much its own. The album begins with a wash of piano that carries splendor and melancholia in equal measures and ends with the pointillistic rhythm of Morse code spelling out the final words of The Waste Land, “Shantih shantih shantih”—peace.

In 2022, T.S. Eliot’s poem will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Its central themes—solitude, estrangement and a wounded world with an alarmingly uncertain future—are even more pressing today than they were 100 years ago. Boris Rogowski’s soundscapes embody the mood perfectly: The fear and darkness as much as the faint, yet stubborn hope for the light of a new day.

Boris Rogowski - The Sound Of Horns And Motors

Breathless

This track was composed especially for Piano Day 2020. It is a live recording of an acoustic Erard piano through multiple microphones and tape recorders as well as Space Echoes. 

Enjoy and share,

Happy Piano Day !

Relive

Relive [Piano Day 2020]

Due out on limited CD on July 24th

DR-69 : PORYA HATAMI - Kani + Remixes (incl. Darren McClure, Purl, Arovane, Tomotsugu Nakamura, Sven Laux) 

Originally released in 2013 on the Inner Ocean label, Porya Hatami’s “Kani” was a four track EP showcasing his intimate take on modern ambient music. The Iranian artist has issued a large number of albums that imbue pastoral ambient with subtle field recordings and melodies. The melodic aspect of Hatami’s work took centre stage in this release, and shone bright across the four pieces.

So now, seven years later, “Kani” is being given the reissue that it deserves, and will delight those listeners new to it, and those who are rediscovering it again. Besides the original four tracks, there are an additional five remixes by artists working in a similar orbit to Hatami, and some who have collaborated directly with him in the past.

These reworks cover plenty of ground, reimagining the source material into new shapes. Some remixes extend the foggy soundscapes and conjure delicate melodic plucks. Others add mellow pulses that infer rhythm under the washes of sound, while others take these rhythmic ideas much further.  

Original tracks mastered by Jason Corder aka offthesky
Remixes mastered by Porya Hatami
Artwork by Hawar Amini

Buy CD / DL

PORYA HATAMI - Kani (night) (Arovane Remix)

oneness (Azygos) / یگانگی 
Music/ Visual: VEHUT (Hani Abdolmagid) 

watch music video on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbvB12-YHtI

ANTS Music/ Visual Project thinks about being the “ANTI-Thing” in human socials. To be such small as an Ant that is smaller than the others. Like an “Independent Thing” maybe, or like a Migrant. 
ANTS is a solo theatre performance from Garage Theater Company that is continuously being developed.

vehut rec. 2020

VEHUT - oneness (Azygos) |  یگانگی

Vortex

Hero

Justina Jaruševičiūtė (composer)
Héloïse Lefebvre (1st violin), Davis West (2nd violin), Alexina Hawkins (viola), Liron Yariv (cello)
Recorded at Christuskirche Berlin-Oberschöneweide 
All tracks recorded, mixed and mastered by Sebastian Ohmert, Tonstudio Sonic-Impulse Berlin 
Artwork and design: Celia Fernández González 
piano and coffee records

Justina Jaruševičiūtė - Prayer

Justina Jaruševičiūtė

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