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Niklas Paschburg - Insight

Artist: Rachel Grimes
Title: The Herald
Album: The Clearing
Release Date: May 26, 2015

Rachel Grimes is a pianist, composer, and arranger based in Kentucky – most renowned for her work in Rachel's, the groundbreaking chamber-rock ensemble that introduced an entire generation of underground rock fans to the unexpected similarities and appeal of neoclassical music. Grimes has toured the world as a solo pianist, and as a collaborator with chamber ensembles such as Portland Cello Project, astrïd, Cicada, the Amsterdam Sinfonietta trio, and Orchestra Kandinskij.

Unhurried, at times fleeting, and stretching into the sky, The Clearing is a winding path of transient moments exploring personal memory, relationships, and mystery from a deeply internal place. The music is a wide spectrum of textures in strings, harp, piano, woodwinds, and percussion. Following Book of Leaves (2009), the Marion County 1938 DVD/EP (2011), the Compound Leaves EP (2013), and an album with King’s Daughters & Sons (2011), this new full-length album reveals a broad new chapter for Rachel Grimes.

Several composed pieces evolved from improvisation, such as “In the Vapor”, “The Clearing”, and “Further Foundation”. Others include captured improvisation: album highlight “The Herald”, recorded live with Jacob Duncan on saxophone and Helen Money on cello, and “The Air at Night”, a late-night meditation at a recording session in Antwerp. 

The title track, “The Clearing”, was recorded with members of the Amsterdam
Sinfonietta following a series of performances for CrossLinx Festival in spring of 2013. After the joy of working together, Grimes proposed a long-distance recording session. Evolving from a single repeated piano note, “The Clearing” begins tense and dissonant with the string trio and piano eventually arriving at a moment of relief and grace – a light in the forest – and then returning again to the material of the opening.

“Transverse Plane” was designed for SITI Company of New York for an actor training stage exercise. In two sections, the piece uses a pre-existing architecture of tempo and underlying compositional structure. The first part – “Vertical” – is a driving, orchestral texture of strings, harp, piano, oboe and saxophone with Kyle Crabtree (Shipping News) on mixed percussion. The second half – “Horizontal” – unfolds from a mist of strings with slow-moving chords and features Christian Frederickson (Rachel's) in an angular and expressive viola solo.

Inspired by the wind and sky, “The Airs” feature violinist Scott Moore. Written with a single theme and mode, the suite becomes a connective tissue for the album’s various textures. In perhaps the album's most vital collaboration, Scott Morgan (aka LOSCIL) provides the delicate processing and additional depth of field that invites outsiders to enter this fluid space for their own experience.

© 2015 Temporary Residence Ltd.

Pre-Order CD / LP

Rachel Grimes – The Herald

Moon Ate the Dark - Ventricles

from 'Nomad Frequencies' [CD|2xLP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den237
available in September on all formats at [http://denovali.com/johnlemke]

An ardent moulder of sound, John Lemke began carving out a very unique music blend on his debut album 'People Do' (2013) and its follow up EP 'Walizka' (2014). Informed by his work as a sound designer & composer for documentary films and his natural inclination towards fusing rhythm with rich textures and emotive melodies, he set out on a musical path that had been long in the making and is ever evolving.

The quest for unusual, inspiring sound sources has always been at the heart of John's process, however the genesis of his second album 'Nomad Frequencies' was rooted in much more inadvertent circumstances. In the summer of 2014, forced to indefinitely evacuate his Glasgow flat and studio due to structural damage from one hour to the next, with nothing more than a laptop and a bag of clothes, John embarked on a six month odyssey of soul searching, couch surfing and spending an extended period of time in his old hometown of Berlin for the first time in years - it was to be an odyssey that would help ferment and distill the ideas of his second album on which work had just begun. 

A year of particular global turmoil and upheaval, combined with John's personal, albeit very minor, 'displacement', caused a lot of questioning, frustration and anger, which somehow found its way onto the new material: a more confrontational, at times aggressive sound, paired on the other hand with a yearning for harmony, balance and space. Other influences came less from the world of music, but rather in visual form, through the densely textural art of Anselm Kiefer and the political, yet poetic musings of film maker Adam Curtis.

Intent on refining his sound toward a more minimal, bolder style, John set out to limit his sonic palate to a handful of carefully chosen elements. At the centre of this new direction remains the muted piano already introduced on his debut, but in a much more purified and raw form. This organic base is adorned by the warm fuzzing and wavering of analogue synthesisers, tape echoes, meditative tuning forks, field recordings from John's 'exile' period and percussion based on his rigid approach to sampling, which started developing on 'Walizka'. The guiding principle of his orthodox style of recording and sampling is to only use home-made sounds by utilising his own field recordings, applying contact microphones or hydrophones to objects and instruments, running them through different kinds of speakers and re-recording the sounds to arrive at a 'lived in' quality, often misunderstood as plainly 'lo-fi'. Touches of viola and woodwinds parts (Kim Moore of WOLF and Andrew Baker respectively) provide melody fragments and subtle details throughout the journey.

With John's healthy disregard for genre boundaries, the array of influences on 'Nomad Frequencies' is vast, but never over-powering. From the meditative tuning fork that starts proceedings on 'Of Elsewhere', the dub echoes to the hints of minimalism, free jazz explosions to the Lynchian atmospherics, all elements serve nothing more than the album's narrative journey between friction and harmony, best appreciated in its entirety. A rhythmic backbone collides with rich ambience and melody, often infectious and jarring at the same time, forging a soulful whole which most likely only reveals its true self after multiple spins.

Nomad Frequencies

John Lemke - The Unwinding

Taken from the forthcoming album 'Asylum For Eve', released February 10th 2017.

Featuring new material and reworked soundtracks, the album drifts from plaintive piano-led passages to brisk chamber music and back again, tied together by the textured layering of found sounds and instruments that distinguishes Thomas’s music.

After tracking down an old Bechstein Model 9 upright piano for ‘Asylum For Eve’, Thomas set about modifying and preparing it with cardigans, screws and nails in order to provide the textures and timbres which characterise the album’s dense, affecting sound. Techniques employed for the album include the intricate layering of bowed guitars and ukuleles, and fingerpicked violins, banjo and charango. It’s processes such as these, coupled with Hill’s high quality composition and musicianship, that see the album at once expansive and intimate.

Asylum For Eve

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Thomas William Hill - Cirrostratus

A piece to represent the perception of the acceleration of time as we get older

Summer

21 to 21

Jim Perkins - 21 To 21

Bersarin Quartett - St. Petersburg

Live recording of Nils Frahm's concert at Radialsystem in Berlin on 21 November, 2011.
Published with permission of the artist. 

If you like what you hear, support the artist! You can get Nils Frahm's releases here:
http://www.erasedtapes.com/artists/biography/13/Nils+Frahm
http://www.nilsfrahm.de

Nils Frahm @ UM:LAUT - Live Snippet 1

Berlin based cellist and composer Anne Müller, announces the release of her long awaited debut solo album 'Heliopause'. 

Heliopause follows several Erased Tapes releases featuring Anne, including her celebrated collaboration with Nils Frahm titled 7fingers, appearances on Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm’s Collaborative Works, Nils Frahm’s All Melody and his acclaimed soundtrack for the film Victoria, Lubomyr Melnyk’s Fallen Trees, as well as the two bespoke solo pieces Walzer für Robert and Bel Tono for the label’s 5th and 10th anniversary box sets. In fact, a glance at  Müller’s Discogs boasts credits on over 60 releases since she began recording in 2007.

Classically trained at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts under the renowned cellist and conductor Michael Sanderling, Anne Müller performed as a cellist in many of Berlin’s symphonies for some time before choosing a different path with her music and focussing on novel approaches to classical instrumentation. A profound believer in the power of artistic collaboration, Anne’s skilled cello playing and instinctive composition became extremely sought after.

Following her work with Nils Frahm, an enduring partnership with singer-songwriter-composer Agnes Obel ensued, touring for five years together and featuring on two albums (Philharmonics and Aventine) and most recently, working with multi-instrumentalist Markus Sieber (aka Aukai) on his 2019 album Reminiscence. In between all this, Müller also co-founded the progressive live project Solo Collective along with violinist/singer Alex Stolze and pianist/conceptual artist Sebastian Reynolds, releasing Solo Collective Part One in 2017.

A solo record in every sense of the word, Müller wrote, recorded, arranged and produced Heliopause. The album is named after the boundary where the sun’s wind ceases to have influence. It is ultimately, the border of our solar system. The name struck a chord with Müller since the two voyagers sent on an exploratory mission 42 years ago, recently crossed the Heliopause, entering into interstellar space and losing power from our own sun. Müller recognised herself in this moment, not only approaching the same age, but also breaking new ground; having relied on collaborating with so many other stars and now venturing into the unknown with her first solo statement; “Heliopause marks the end of a long journey but also the start of voyages to explore strange new worlds”

Both as the closing title track and album as a whole, Heliopause crosses these physical and invisible borders throughout, sending the cello as a typically classical instrument to exciting new and uncharted territory.

· pre-order 'Heliopause' on LP/CD/DL: https://idol.lnk.to/Heliopause

Heliopause

Nummer 2

Buy LP/CD/DL

Anne Müller - Nummer 2

I was excited to see this wonderful collection of little piano vignettes released by Nils, one of my favorite piano players and people. The simplicity of these pieces and the honesty I feel in the music communicated a sense of ease and exploration that I immediately connected with.  This is my rework of a beautiful passage contained in the song "Re". 

http://www.unseen-music.com

http://reworked.nilsfrahm.com/

Kim Hiorthoy - Det oläskiga rummet

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