Les Métaboles / Léo Warynski THE ANGELS

 

THE ANGELS

Manuel Zurria REPEAT!

The restless experimentation and creativity of Manuel Zurria (of Alter Ego fame) has resulted in a brilliant series of collaborative works with legendary composers such as Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Pärt, John Cage, Morton Feldman, László Sáry, Louis Andriessen, Aldo Clementi, Zoltan Jeney, Stefano Scodanibbio, Salvatore Sciarrino, Jonathan Harvey and Kevin Volans. A truly stunning mixture of electronic and longform electro-acoustic pieces, repetitive ethnic rhythms, drones and delay, field recordings, flute and the human voice.

Repeat is the diary of an obsession that has been accompanying me for four long years. Alighiero Boetti, one of the fathers of Italian conceptual art, had fit out along a wall of his house in Rome his most introspective work: The Wall. On this wall he showed, continuously modifying their choice and position, objects and works belonging to his own production or to the one of other artists friends, together with objects he found by chance on the street, family pictures and drawings of his children. In other words, his own world. During the realisation of this project I have been reading “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze, which gave me the occasion to ponder on the involvements that bring back to the principle of repetition in music of our time. In a certain sense, Deleuze’s writing allowed me to focus on the importance of repetition as a perceptive fact, and as an experience of listening in accumulation. In the same time, I thought of repetition as difference, as a minimal fact, as trance. This element has been determinant in my activity and allowed me to collaborate during the years with musicians who look at repetition as an exciting experience, both physical and mystic. (Manuel Zurria)

JONATHAN HARVEY – BEAT FURRER – GEORGES APERGHIS – UNSUK CHIN Sprechgesänge

"Sprechgesänge" – "Speech Songs" run throughout the program of the first CD in the new “edition musikFabrik” on WERGO: Voices try out their instrumental possibilities, and instruments savor their vocal potential.

In his “meditation on the nature of language as sound,” Jonathan Harvey alludes directly to the “inventor” of the Sprechgesang, Arnold Schönberg. Beat Furrer provides the protagonist of Arthur Schnitzler’s "Fräulein Else" with several different “language spaces” – like an encephalogram, he records the oscillations of an interior monologue. Georges Aperghis teaches a clarinet to “babble,” and Unsuk Chin gives an answer to a question from Georges Perec: What might it sound like to throw rotten tomatoes at singers of the species "cantatrix sopranica"? In dreamlike fashion, Chin causes multiple musics of various styles and periods to swirl through one another in a furious piece.

The live recordings document highlights from the concert series "musikFabrik im WDR", with noted soloists such as David Cordier, Salome Kammer and Anu and Piia Komsi, and the conductors Stefan Asbury, Sian Edwards, Beat Furrer and Peter Rundel. Two members of Ensemble musikFabrik, Carl Rosman and Peter Veale, provide evidence of the ensemble’s soloistic qualities. (wergo.de)