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On the night of Sunday, May 6, 2001, composer Kenneth Kirschner, as part of a series of pieces documenting the sounds of different New  York City neighborhoods, took his tape recorder to the Financial  District of Lower Manhattan to begin field recordings for a new  piece. The resulting low-resolution portrait captured the sounds of a  deserted urban landscape: the empty, winding streets of old Dutch New  Amsterdam, its modern, towering skyscrapers — and a region of the  city that, several months later, would be renamed Ground Zero.

and/OAR is proud to present “May 6, 2001”, a collection of five interpretations by five renowned  contemporary composers of the aforementioned  field recording portrait.

With excerpts from Kirschner’s original  2001 composition based on the field recording, the CD also includes pieces  by Taylor Deupree (USA), Tomas Korber (Switzerland), Ralph  Steinbrüchel (Switzerland), and Aaron Ximm (aka Quiet American; USA), all utilizing the 2001 Financial District field recording as their sole source material. The result is a project that obliquely and  subtly evokes the source recording and its subsequent meanings, while  also standing on its own as an estimable example of each artist’s  mastery of his craft.

“Pop quiz: when’s the last time you heard a remix album that was good all the way through? Even the best of the crop usually contains at least one clunker—often many more than that. It’s the risk you take: you’re a fan, you’re intrigued, but somewhere in the back of your head, you can’t quite trust the original material to be reworked by someone else the way you liked it the first time. Remix albums are, by nature, experiments, and as such, the point of them isn’t necessarily to better the original, but rather to simply present things from a different angle to simply see what happens.

That said, Bricolages—a collection of remixes of tracks from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2005 album Chasm—succeeds where most other remixes don’t. It isn’t necessarily that the material here betters the originals, as Chasm was a fine return to Sakamoto’s electro-pop roots. Rather, because Sakamoto’s work has always been diverse and stylistically varied, Bricolages doesn’t require that it be judged against the original work. Sakamoto has worked in acoustic, electronic, and classical genres extensively, and so a remix album is par for the course. Putting together a diverse set of remixers to tackle his material seems far less out of place for Sakamoto than it does for most other artists because he takes these same approaches to his own music already.

Of course, as with any remix album, the finished product is only as good as the remixers you enlist, and Sakamoto has signed up a most interesting combination. There’s fellow Japanese artists AOKI Takamasa and Cornelius taking on “War & Peace” from two decidedly different angles (glitchy and skittering versus loose and fun, respectively). There’s micromeisters Fennesz, Alva Noto, and snd. There’s twitchy technohead Richard Devine, noted soundtrack composer Craig Armstrong, Rob Da Bank & Mr. Dan, and the pride of Hefty Records, Slicker. There’s even a fantastic take on “Break With” from former Japan (the band) drummer Steve Jansen, with whom Sakamoto has worked the longest out of those assembled. The fact that he turns in perhaps the best and most unexpected work here is illustrative of why the whole project works. This isn’t so much a break from the norm for Sakamoto as it is a logical next step.

Sakamoto’s best work is all about combining disparate elements from his myriad musical tastes into a new whole. The selections here cross cultural and generational boundaries, making them not all the different from a standard Sakamoto LP. And if I were told nothing more before hearing Bricolages for the first time than, “This is the new Ryuichi Sakamoto album,” it wouldn’t sound the least bit odd to me. In fact, it would sound like his best album in years. Conveniently enough, the word “bricolage” roughly translated means “construction achieved by whatever comes to hand.” He couldn’t have found a better title for this project. ” – Stylus Magazine

The inspiration behind Northern (including its music, title and photography) comes from Deupree’s recent relocation from the heart of urban activity in Brooklyn to the tranquility of the forest in upstate New York. Inspired by nature and the winter during which it was created, Northern, like much of his recent work, explores Deupree’s interest in stillness and a slowed sense of time. Through quiet textures, subtle movements, faint loops and echoes, it was his goal to create the type of music that comes naturally to him while also highlighting the input from his dramatic new surroundings.

In contrast to the brazen repetition found on Stil., Northern’s
Deupree’s earthbound ideas in the album are rooted in his choice of sounds and studio practices. His now-signature Kyma manipulations are still prominent, but they have been applied to improvised electric piano, melodica, guitar, and field recordings using techniques picked up from his experimental/pop collaboration with Eisi (Every Still Day, Noble Records, Japan, 2005). A careful balance is kept through the layering of synthetic source tones of basic waveforms and long, drawn-out, fragile swells. Northern is melodic, warm and introspective, forming a bed of sound that is simultaneously quiet and noisy, structured and unsettled, looping and chaotic.

In spring 2003 steinbrüchel received an invitation from the Swiss music festival „Taktlos“ in Berne to contribute a track for their listening room equipped with a surround 5.1 sound system. During the two-day festival in November 2003 steinbrüchel’s track entitled „opaque” was played back in cycle mode (among tracks from various other artists). The listening room focused on the experience of being able to listen to music in a very quiet and large environment – unlikely to most home listening situations. Additionally the possibility of working in surround gave the musicians a chance to create very special audio sculptures in the space.

The track „opaque“ by steinbrüchel and five remixes is being released by the Australian label room40. The remixes were created by the internationally well known artists Oren Ambarchi (AUS), Taylor Deupree (US), Frost (AUS), Toshiya Tsunoda (JP) and Chris Abrahams (NZ). Each of the contributing artists was chosen for his unique working method (Oren for his work with guitar, Taylor for processed sounds, Frost guitar feedback, Toshiya for field recordings and Chris for piano). To make the remixes more varied and special, each artist received only three samples/soundfiles from the original track, but none of the artists have received the same samples or even have heard the original „opaque“ track by steinbrüchel before the release of the CD.

This is the first compilation album from Spekk compiled by the label owner mondii. Each of the artists were asked to compose a track with their interpretations of “small melodies” with Keywords like Warm, tender and calm. It was meant to present diversity of minimal-style music in a peaceful “harmonic” way. And it was a coincidence that both Taylor Deupree & Stephan Mathieu created a track dedicated to their child.

The first half of the album is the more “digital” side and the last half more “analog” side encompassing laptop digital processing to field recording materials (For instance, Naph’s track is only made out of frequencies within the wind/air) to band oriented materials.

Participants delivers these great pieces of music from various continents including USA, Sweden, France, Germany, Australia and Japan showing slight relationships between each other which kind of gives us a warm feeling of unity within this ongoing global minimalist scene. It was also my intention to present that nowadays, there are not much differences between the outputs from more digital background artists and more band oriented musicians due to their methods of composing (technology) and interests and such. Evidently, more and more rock labels will release digital processed music and bands will use digital softwares, electronic artists will become more aware of small sounds and warmth of the nature. I take this positive!