Like the progression and edginess of this track.  Descrecendo at end clever touch.

Following the warmly-received Paces (1631 Recordings/Decca Publishing) and the collaborative Stadsbilder (Time Released Sound), Swedish composer and multi-instrumentalist Jakob Lindhagen presents his second solo full-length album Memory Constructions on piano and coffee records.

Recorded together with German brother-duo Sebastian and Daniel Selke (aka CEEYS, whose collaborations also include Ólafur Arnalds and Spitfire) and longtime artistic collaborator Sofia Nystrand (Vargkvint), the album merges elements of neoclassical and ambient music, with a foundation of intimate piano works paired with violoncello and vocal synth, expanded with musical saw, kantele, bowed glockenspiel and sound experiments, recorded to analogue equipment. 

”Memories are an equally complicated as fascinating aspect of the human mind. After realizing a couple of memories from my childhood surroundings simply didn’t add up - the timeline didn’t make sense so I couldn’t have been in that place at that time, or a block of houses not being placed where they actually were - I became slightly obsessed with memory research. Our memories play such a huge part of our identities, yet they are extremely unreliable, change and fade over time, and are easily influenced and manipulated. And yet I couldn’t help myself also finding beauty in the fact that I both completely trust and distrust my own memories, that make up who I am. So digging from these slightly contradicting feelings, and from where my own memories are either constructed, fading, forgotten, rewritten, made up or completely true, this album was concieved.” 

Memory Constructions has been supported by the Swedish Arts Council, and is coming out digitally and on limited edition vinyl on the 23rd of September, featuring artwork by Sofia Nystrand and desing/layout by Celia Bayo.

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Jakob Lindhagen - Here, Before

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.

Adriaan Swerts - Broken Silence

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.

Adriaan Swerts - Old Shelter

Adriaan Swerts - Distant Overtones

Adriaan Swerts - Fade

Adriaan Swerts - Translucence

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 - Marie Marie

Hiding (Reworks) is a unique collection of recompositions highlighting the talents of several exciting musicians, centering around a track that pianist and composer Garreth Broke wrote for solo piano called Hiding.

Hiding was first released as part of a collaboration with artist Anna Salzmann titled Healing, which explored the healing process in all its complexities. Whenever Garreth returned to the piece or played it in concerts, he kept having new ideas for it, as if the piece itself were telling him that it wanted to grow. This prompted him to invite a group of musicians whose work he admires to create a series of reworks of this composition, encouraging them to be as adventurous as they liked — a task that they really embraced, leading to some mesmerising results.

The result is this EP, in which Hiding is presented in six different forms. First, you’ll hear the original piece re-recorded on a gorgeous felted C. Bechstein upright piano, then reinterpreted by the fantastic ondes Martenot player and multi-instrumentalist Josh Semans from the UK. The wonderful Australian clarinetist and looper Ruby Lulham, aka Clariloops, offers up the gorgeous third track, which is followed by an exhilerating rework by Sweden-based Vargkvint and Jakob Lindhagen featuring wordless vocals, kantele, zither, harmonium, electric organ and synthesizers. In the fifth track, the piece is reworked into an atmospheric piano-led song sung by Vargkvint with lyrics by artist Anna Salzmann, who created the paintings that first inspired the project. Finally, Josh Semans closes out the collection with a brief but beautiful reprise.

This collection of recompositions shines a light on the unique talents of its contributors and, like a kaleidoscope, fragments of the original piece are ever-present but always shown in a new light. Hiding (Reworks) comes out on the 3rd of March, featuring artwork by Anna Salzmann and graphic design by Celia Bayo.

Garreth Broke - Hiding (Felted Piano Rework)

Edges is taken from the album ‘Swept’, an exploration of emotional turbulence, resilience and rejuvenation. Created with electric guitar, modular and analogue synthesizers and pedals, most of the sounds were recorded at the start of the global pandemic. The album is bookended with field recordings made from the artist’s garden in East London. It opens with the sound of tarpaulin sheets on a neighboring construction site swept by heavy winds during Storm Ciara, shortly before the first UK lockdown, and closes with the sound of birdsong after rainfall, signaling hope for better times.

Swept

Wil Bolton - Edges

Simply a minimal tune, some sonic wallpaper. "Repetition is a form of change." ... an oblique strategy ... stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

Inspired by minimal drone music in general, the subtleties of an oscillator, filter, reverb, or any sound source.

Thanks for listening...

Graining Gibbous

A relevant spot for artists from all over the world who cross the borders between ambient, electronic, and contemporary classical music.

label@pianoandcoffee.com

Vargkvint / Sergio Díaz De Rojas / Klangriket / Plinki Plonki / Manos Milonakis / Cedric Vermue / Sjors Mans / Justina Jaruševičiūtė / Didacte / Adrien Casalis / Leon den Engelsen

Adriaan Swerts - Distant Overtones

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