Recording Location: “Klangraum” Mineralien-Museum at Essen-Kupferdreh, Germany Instruments of the collection performed by Submerged, Julia Zanke with special guest Achim G. Reisdorf Voice: Julia Zanke
Recorded by Kurt Gluck and Achim G. Reisdorf with special thanks to Jonathan Baruc for the provided equipment
Mixed and Mastered by Submerged Executive Producer: Achim G. Reisdorf
Instrumentarium: Gravel, Gravel Bed, Rocker filled with Stones, Wooden Drum filled with Stones, Stone Slabs, Pien Ch’ing Gong, Rock Gongs (Tiles, Roof Slates), Small Lithophones compiled from fragments of Stone Slabs, Large Phonolite Lithophone, Large Pentatonic Greenschist Lithophone, Quartz Glass Bowls, Elmar Daucher Klangstein, Mallets (Pebbles, Small Prismatic Rocks, Wooden Sticks and Beater, Timpani Sticks), Voice
The “Klangstein” is a Scuplture by Elmar Daucher The Pentatonic Greenschist Lithophone was made by Jochen Fassbender The Quartz Glass Bowls were manufactured by Heraeus Quarzglas GmbH All other stone installations originate from Julia Zanke
Special thanks: Ulrike Stottrop (Head of Natural Science Collections of the Stiftung Ruhr Museum and Mineralien-Museum), Bürgerschaft Kupferdreh e.V., people of the Mineralian-Museum, Stiftung Ruhr Museum
Photos by Rainer Rothenberg (all rocks), Achim G. Reisdorf
Haunting, delicate, beautiful . . . and soon to be incorporated into a mix.
The album was recorded at Bremen’s Sendesaal in April 2019.
Background
Lost Prayers is the first of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür’s New Series recordings to be devoted entirely to his chamber music. Scaled-back instrumental forces, however, are no indicator of reduced expressive power, and the volatility of Tüür’s concept emerges forcefully from the first seconds of Fata Morgana which is, with Lichttürme, one of two pieces for violin, violoncello and piano. These pieces are performed by the Estonian trio of Harry Traksmann, Leho Karin and Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann, all of whom have played Tüür’s music extensively and made appearances on earlier ECM discs, including Crystallisatio and Oxymoron. The German-based Signum Quartett plays Tüür’s Second String Quartet, Lost Prayers, and Signum violinist Florian Donderer also performs Synergie together with cellist Tanya Tetzlaff. Collectively the musicians underline Erkki-Sven Tüür’s view that “one can build up a really rich and wide palette of sounds with only three or four instruments. You don’t necessarily need a full orchestra to operate with a powerful soundscape.” The album was recorded in April 2019, in Bremen’s acoustically-responsive Sendesaal, a room with long-established associations with ECM (reaching back to Jarrett’s Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne of 1973).
In an interview with filmmaker Ingo J. Bierman, Erkki-Sven Tüür spoke about the genesis of the Lost Prayers album project: “Manfred Eicher had wanted to record an album focused on my chamber music works for many years, but it was only after I composed Lichttürme that I felt: now we have a set of pieces we could really release together. This chamber music collection is very important to me. The works Lichttürme and Synergie show very clearly what I mean with vectorial writing: you can see these different angles of seemingly parallel movements in the melodies and how I am building up these spiral-like, constantly changing harmonic results.” The technical considerations frame, Tüür says, the “aspects we are not able to talk about”, the expressive and emotional components of the music. The pieces are also, he says, “spaces of poetry, full of a wide array of everything that makes us human. There is light and darkness, pain, fury and a touch of redeeming love.”
A particularly powerful performance of Synergie at the Spannungen festival Heimbach by Florian Donderer and Tanja Tetzlaf gave impetus to the album project. Donderer was already playing with the Signum Quartet who were therefore an obvious choice for the first recording of Lost Prayers. Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Second String Quartet was written in 2012 in response to a commission from the ARD International Music Competition and premiered at Munich’s Prinzegententheater the same year. The religious reference in its title is uncommon in a worklist where compositions are more often identified by rational-systematic designations (see for instance his long sequence of Architectonics pieces). “I tried to imagine a cloud of cries for help – from believers, non-believers, people of different traditions, of different periods of history. Are these cries lost? The music is dealing with the energetic field of the accumulation of these spontaneous outcries.”
Erkki-Sven Tüür, who was born in Estonia in 1959, is among the most original composers of his generation. Having studied percussion and flute, he developed his skills in composition at the Tallinn Conservatoire (1980–4) and subsequently pursued an interest in electronic music in Karlsruhe. In 1979, Tüür founded the group In Spe, in which he was active as composer, instrumentalist, and vocalist. By the late 1980s he had embarked wholeheartedly on his path as a composer; his musical development has been charted in a series of ECM releases which began with Crystallisatio (1996) and continued with Flux (1999), Exodus (2003), Oxymoron (2007), Strata (2010), and Seventh Symphony/Piano Concerto (2014). The 2015 album Gesualdo included both original compositions and Tüür’s string arrangement of Gesualdo’s O Crux benedicta.
Tüür’s early works explore a variety of techniques polystylistically, among them Gregorian chant and minimalism, linear polyphony and microtonality, twelve-tone music and sound-field technique. A transition in his musical language can be heard in Oxymoron where Tüür first employed what he calls his vectorial writing method, a means of developing pieces from “a source code – a gene which, as it mutates and grows, connects the dots in the fabric of the whole composition”.
Tüür’s 21st-century music eschews what he has called “unnecessary eclecticism” in favour of organic coherence. Of his art, Tüür has said: “One of my goals is to reach the creative energy of the listener. Music as an abstract form of art is able to create different visions for each of us.”
CD booklet includes liner notes by Wolfgang Sandner in German and English
“‘Tumbling Towards a Wall’ is a keening batch of dematerialised atmospheres and lilting rhythms bound to lull listeners into hypnagogic states with its anxiety-sink ambient spongiforms and diary-like and drift-away textures. In eight low-lit and fuzzy parts they feel out smudged textures flecked with iridescent, gauzy melodies and habitual, stream-of-consciousness keys that toe the finest line between enervated and ember-like. It’s a proper, cockle-warming sound that says its piece with measured modesty and a glowing sense of soul that resonates with Dominique Lawalrée and Ryuichi Sakamoto just as much as Ulla’s peers, such as Special Guest DJ and Pendant.
The sort of record that may leave users struggling to even get up and flip the sides, such is its soporific pull, ‘Tumbling Towards a Wall’, enacts a sort of slow motion collision with all the sensuality of knackered Ballardian pillow-talk. Each track here teases the senses with a range of frayed, fractured and breezily unresolved structures that exert an ideal ambient sleight-of-hand primed to lead listeners’ thoughts off on their own woozy tangents between the music’s mix of syrupy/brittle rhythm and elusive atmospheric clag. On the A-side the sounds all remains detectably electronic, but for those who manage to keep their lids over half-mast, the B-side blossoms with sampled acoustic textures between a scudding choral cut-up that’s surely worth the entry alone, and in the closing thread of rainy day piano keys that perfuse and wilt in the heart-clutching closing piece. For solitary reflection, Ulla’s first mononymous release is a gorgeous record that mellows and balances any physical or mental space it comes into contact with.” – boomkat.com
This started out by taking a song sample out-take (The Tunnel) from the album (Place Language) & slicing it up into smaller components. I was really just playing around with & dissecting the sound-files; and then it gradually took shape, expanded . . . & eventually formed into a mini, & then a full blown mix.
The process involved multiple layers of audio (layered upon still other layers), overlap & ghost editing . . . always fun . . . but I had to keep meticulous notes of what I was doing along the way . . . or I’d have ended up having no idea of what the track-listing actually was.
Cover art developed from a photo taken in Wildwood, NJ on 8.26.20from our hotel balcony.
80:24
01 Martina Verhoeven, Colin Webster & Dirk Serries – Modulation Grid I (excerpt) 02 Sam Rosenthal, Shadow & Steve Roach – The Gesture of History (excerpt) 03 Six Microphones – Overture, part 1 (ending edit) 04 .foundation & Keys for Eclipse – Surge 05 The Inward Circles – Tunnel Intro (stretch snippet of the tail end of the composition) ___06 Tunnel 1 (1st half of the composition) ___07 Reverse Edit (the mid-section of the composition, reversed) ___08 Tunnel 2 (2nd half of the composition) 09 Imprints – Longshore Drift 10 David Torn, Tim Berne & Ches Smith – Spartan, Before it Hit (treated excerpt) 11 Zahn, Hatami & Mcclure – Prysma 12 Ambient Landscape – Spartan (custom wash) 13 Chris Russell – Varuna 14 A Produce – Night Curve 15 France Jobin – Singulum; s 16 PCM – Attraverso 17 Viridian Sun – Voidvertigo 18 Pepo Galán – Train Without Direction 19 Cinchel – The Windows Barely Keep Out the Cold, Sealed Against the Wind & the Ice ___w/ Tunnel Outtro
Pictures was the debut album from the UK’s Motion. It was originally released in 2000 on his own imprint as a hand-numbered edition of 500 CDs in a clear sleeve with vellum insert.
A copy of the CD was discovered by 12k’s Taylor Deupree and Line’s Richard Chartier at a bookstore in Sheffield, England in 2001. After purchasing the disc Deupree spent a couple of years trying to track down its maker which eventually lead to Chris Coode, the man behind Motion.
Motion went on to record two albums for 12k: Dust, in 2002 and Every Action in 2004 and continues to be a favorite for his signature fractured, yet oddly human sound. This was “glitch” made without the modern day ease of DSP and plug in trickery instead utilizing an analog synth, hardware samplers, and a lot of talent.
12k is happy to be able to re-release this album in a downloadable format and make this little-known and beautiful work available once again. Pictures would have happily existed on 12k back in 2000 and, together with Dust and Every Action remind us of an important time in 12k’s history.
Cat.#: LONTANO-S-CD14 Release date: 12/08/2020 Format: CD, Digital
Digital download is offered as name-your-price till release date.
“With these tracks I wanted to create overlapping dialogues between lo-fi and hi-fi, human and nature, artist and machines. These attempted dialogues are fragile, they don’t aim for a perfect balance, they just want to be alive and breathe.
Happy 2021! Here’s hoping this brand new year brings you to the threshold of your dreams & goals . . . & beyond!
This is a culling of various, vaporous, ambient artifacts, relics & cherished sacrificial aural ceremonies from years gone by and 3 more recent tracks (1, 3 & 11); meshing/mashing experimental derivatives with the vast ambient landscape.
Constructed over this past Thanksgiving break.
01 Nicola Di Croce – Deus Sive Natura (excerpt)
02 Juta Takahashi – Silence
03 Harold Budd – Yellow
04 Jeff Greinke – City Light
05 Tomas Weiss & Anthony Kerby – Vision 4
06 Brian Eno – Written, Forgotten
07 Max Corbacho – One True Light (edit)
08 Steve Roach – Cloud Cover
09 Jacob Newman & Devin Underwood – Tracing Memory
Ambient Landscape 