2023 Playback

House of the Truth

Pachinko: Season 1 (Apple TV+ Original Series Soundtrack)

White Rice

There I See Everything

Sumu Puistossa

Fonetica Amara

Pescado

Meeting with a Judas Tree

Drift ft. Lamin Fofana

Exception (Soundtrack from the Netflix Anime Series)

what it is all for

Canto Ostinato is the new volume of classical minimalism from musician and producer Erik Hall. Written for four pianos in 1979 by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, the piece is freshly framed as an intimate, hour-long solo performance consisting of multitracked grand pianos, electric piano, and organ. Modern yet warm, ethereal yet tangible, Hall’s Canto Ostinato expertly bridges a revered piece of meditative concert repertoire with a tactile and highly personal studio setting.

Chicago-born and Michigan-based, Erik Hall is known as a multi-instrumental pillar for the groups NOMO, Wild Belle, and his own songwriting moniker In Tall Buildings. He has composed music for feature films, and as a producer/engineer he has shaped records for Natalie Bergman and Western Vinyl labelmates Lean Year. In a 2020 creative pivot, he chose to reinvent composer Steve Reich’s monumental contemporary classical masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians as a solo undertaking, applying the piece’s score to the familiar keyboards, guitars, and synthesizers in his studio. “At the time I think I was working through my identity as a musician and an artist,” Hall explains, “and on a level there was some sort of exorcism of a long held pop spirit.” The album was celebrated for being “freshly thrilling” and “legible in history but assertive of the moment” (Pitchfork) and “beguiling, meditational, and magical” (Electronic Sound). It won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and it quickly joined the canon of the piece’s quintessential recordings.

“There is a pseudo-meditational benefit to working on a longform piece that’s built on repetition,” Hall says. “Every stage— from internalizing the music, to executing the performance, to editing and mixing the record— requires deep and sustained presence of mind. I’ve always been drawn to a hallucinatory combination of harmony and repetition, and I found the entire process addictive.”

An apt second chapter, Canto Ostinato is inherently vast, and its score gives great creative license to the performer. Comprising 106 sections, complete freedom is given to repeat each one as many or as few times as desired. Additional leeway is given with regard to dynamics, articulation, and even instrumentation. On the heels of his previous, rather maximal arrangement, Hall chose to limit this album’s palette to three foundational keyboards of his studio: a 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1978 Rhodes Mark I electric piano, and his family-heirloom 1910 Steinway grand piano. “This particular piece brought the added challenge of rekindling my dexterity as a pianist, something I haven’t maintained in earnest since I was a teenager,” he admits. The ensuing five-note rhythmic motif— the piece’s primary building block— is steady and workmanlike, forgoing virtuosic flare for depth, texture, and resonance, and eventually giving way to the stunning gratification of a gorgeously lyrical left turn.

As with Music for 18 Musicians, Hall employed no loops nor quantization nor any programmed or sequenced instruments of any kind. Every part was performed live in a room and captured with microphones, one at a time, each informed by, and reacting to the last. In this way the record breathes with interplay and an organic humanity, complete with flaws, noise, and the faint sound of turning pages. The recording quality is nonetheless toneful and saturated, characteristic of Hall’s production style and straying from the usual transparency of classical albums by using gear with tubes, transformers, and various stages of compression in the signal path. Always there is unmistakable realism and the feeling of being present in the room, sitting among the keys, hammers, and tines.

Ten Holt said: “Time, patience and discipline are the prerequisites for making a genetic code productive." His landmark composition provides Hall once again with a wondrous space in which to reverently embody this sentiment and deftly convey the elegant beauty of this music.

Erik Hall - "Canto Ostinato - Sections 17 - 30"

Every year in December, the high fog in Vienna starts to weigh heavily, and I tend to forget what summer is like. I mean, literally, going out of the house without a jacket seems like such a distant memory to me that it could well stem from a fairy tail.
In this song, I wanted to capture my essence of summer. A meadow with a plentitude of different flowers, undulating in a breeze of wind. A short rain shower that clears the air and leaves a fresh scent. Lying in the grass, running through it and simply embracing nature. And the melancholic certainty that it is still so many months till I cann enjoy this again …

Composition-wise the piece consist of three variations @ 0:0, 1:01 and 2:42 which level off into different directions after the initial same 9 notes in the beginning. 
In each variation, after some bars of intro, the right hand is shifted versus the left hand so that the „1“ of the right hand comes 1/8 resp 1/16 before the respective „1“ of the left hand. With that offset I try to evoke the feeling of the blossoms moving like soft waves in the wind. 
The tension in the piece comes besides some syncopics also from the gradually increasing metrum in the left hand – from ¼ in the beginning to the subsequent 1/8 pattern starting @ 0:10 that builds the left-hand structure for most of the piece on to the intermittent faster segment @ 2:11 ff with 1/16 metrum.

The piece has been recorded on a Roland FP-90
The picture was created with Stable Diffusion and postprocessed in a very brute way in Powerpoint ☺

Summer Meadow (Solo Piano)

speedbump

(palindrome, on speed)

first yawn

Part 2
'If you trample on an emotion, it'll turn to rain'

-Art by Siiick Dude

Joshua's Birthday (Part 2)

Off-Piste

Apres Ski

My Soft Machine

Blades

SLEEP: Tranquility Base

SLEEP: Tranquility Base (Kelly Lee Owens Remix)

A4 - tu me parles plus (feat. Charlène Darling)

Racine uses sound to transcend the contemporary hellscape. Far from indulging in purely hedonistic escapism or nihilistic detachment, the celebrated Canadian producer confronts difficult emotions head-on, embracing tension and turbulence. Each release reformulates uncertainty into haunted soundscapes bristling with detail, weaving fractured samples, mutant melodies and glacial electronics into a hyper-real reflection of modern living. New two-track single Delirium focuses those same future-seeking sonics into Racine’s most direct – not to mention surprising – work to date.

Side A coalesces the producer’s amorphous electronics into a crystalline dancefloor workout. Soaring vocals clipped from a New Age radio broadcast glide atop ruffneck drums, with noctilucent synth pads and fizzing ambience seeping in through the cracks. Racine’s signature sense of unease and melancholy is still very much present, though here lurking in the track’s low-end and on the periphery; an overwhelming endorphin rush threatening to tip into amphetamine anxiety at any moment. Side B explodes outwards from that same sound palette, dancefloor hooks atomised into formless textures, eschewing melody and rhythm as it reaches toward even more ecstatic heights.

Delirium provides an exhilarating expansion of Racine’s soundworld, demonstrating his prowess as a producer even while moving into new contexts, and speaking to a distinct need for ecstatic release and transcendence.

Mastering by James Ginzburg
Artwork by Niels Wehrspann

Delirium

buy / stream

Racine - Delirium I

Holly (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Totem

Crosby, Stills & Nash

Wooden Ships (2005 Remaster)

Lux in tenebris 3D / Les Cantates de la Peste
Extrait de Wie liegt die Stadt so wüste de Matthias Weckmann

ensemble AGAMEMNON

Alice Kamenezky - Soprano
Ulrik Gaston Larsen - Chitarrone
Mathieu Valfré - Clavecin
Kazuya Gunji - Orgue

Camille Frachet - Son
Bartosch Salmanski / 128dB - Photographie

Enregistré en Janvier 2018 lors de la résidence des Cantates de la Peste au Centre Culturel de Rencontre d'Ambronay

Matthias Weckmann - Wie liegt die Stadt so wüste ?

Mallet Connection 1977

Wasserball ade

2023 Playback

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