Ólafur Arnalds - ...And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness (2010)

Looking forward to my favourite albums from the Erased Tapes label living their best life over the coming winter months, so here's something from Ólafur Arnalds, in his second album.  Still in his early twenties when this album was put together, the former thrash metal drummer and Sigur Ros touring musician solidified his modern classical thumbprint here.

Mostly based around piano and strings, a lot of this will immediately appeal to fans of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, although with subtler use of electronics here (check Gleypa Okkur for about the only incidence); Arnalds at this point was more interested in simple melodies and understated scoring.  It never becomes too sacchrine or dull though, and does have moments when you can tell this is someone with a rock background, as on the aforementioned track or in the drums on Tunglið (which reminds me of sometime labelmate Ben Lukas Boysen a bit).  Gorgeous Icelandic chilliness all round.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: Collaborative Works with Nils Frahm

Nils Frahm & Anne Müller - 7Fingers (2010)

Before her appearance on the Stare EP, German experimental cellist Anne Müller had already collaborated with Nils Frahm on this 2009 joint venture.  First given a private release in a specially-packaged limited run, 7Fingers was reissued by Erased Tapes and US label Hush the following year.

Müller's overdubbed cello lines get a chance to shine on their own first, before the title track sets out the MO for the album: Frahm in heavily electronic mode, with the cello lines either chopped & spliced or multi-tracked and effects laden.  The Reich/Glass-esque Let My Key Be C is an early highlight that dances around your ears before the core of album heads into glitchier territory once more.

Reminds To Teeth with its mix of piano, cello and ambient sounds is a mellower favourite for me, and the album ends with a vocal track sung by Berlin artist Andreas Bonkowski.  This closer, Long Enough, does sound a bit like an end credits song for some European indie thriller, but none the worse for it.  It's actually a perfect ending for a really nice album of interesting twists and turns.

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Nils Frahm & Ólafur Arnalds - Collaborative Works (2015 compi, rec. 2011-15)

Back to Erased Tapes, with a compilation that does exactly what it says on the tin: brings together an hour's worth of EP tracks recorded by labelmates & close friends Nils Frahm & Ólafur Arnalds.  Then tops it off with a bonus 40 minutes drawn from an evening's improvisations whilst planning the reissue of the EPs.

The EP tracks find both artists in a much more pure electronic mode that they normally operate in, most notably on the superb 25 minutes of Loon, recorded 2014 and originally released as a 12" the following year.  They skirt the edges of Cluster-esque minimalism before taking a full-on dive into it with the standout tracks W and M.  This is followed by the three untitled tracks of 2012's more atmospheric Stare EP.  German cellist Anne Müller (who had previously collaborated with Frahm on 2009's 7Fingers album) proves an inspired and understated third partner on the longest track.  Lastly, the 2015 7" (recorded in 2012) Life Story/Love & Glory returns to the more familiar piano-and-ambience of Felt.

As noted above, when meeting up to arrange the EP compilation, Frahm and Arnalds decided to record a new exclusive track for it.  This turned in to an entire evening of spontaneous loveliness, and was titled Trance Frendz, receiving its own vinyl release in 2016.  The first three tracks are again in Felt mode, based around gentle piano and electronics, and washes of harmonium in 23:17 (each track is named after the time recording started).  Then there's a change of scenery with 23:52's swelling synth and harmonium atmosphere, and the pure electronics of 00:26.  Entering the small hours, everything mellows out once more with tinkling piano and music box ambience.  Essential, gorgeous music from start to finish.

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Ben Lukas Boysen - Spells (2016)

It's shaping up to be a great summer for Erased Tapes, with Masayoshi Fujita (previously featured here) releasing a new album this weekend, and Michael Price (recently featured here) following suit a month later.  To celebrate, here's another very fine album from the label, by Ben Lukas Boysen, a Berlin-based musician/composer, friend of Nils Frahm (who mixed/mastered Spells), and erstwhile electronic artist under his Hecq alias.

The marketing for Spells featured a quote from Nils Frahm - "From now on, if anyone asks, this is a real piano" - in reference to Boysen's spare but perfect touch on his central instrument here.  On the opening pair of tracks, everything develops at a glacial pace, before the next pair, Sleepers Beat Theme and Golden Times I pick up pace for the album's stunning centre.  Both are beautifully crafted pieces of soundtracky evocative atmosphere - Sleepers Beat Theme was in fact composed for a documentary short.  The highlights keep coming on Spells' second half, from the most 'electronic' and dramatic track Nocturne 4 to the piano-only closer Selene.  Massively recommended, from start to finish.  Oh, and that album cover doesn't half remind me of something... could it be the record that kickstarted my other favourite record label?

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Michael Price - Entanglement (2015)

More Erased Tapes loveliness, this time from English composer Michael Price.  Having amassed several film and TV scores to his name in the past 20 years, often in collaboration with David Arnold, Entanglement gave Price his first opportunity to create an album in its own right.  His guiding principle here was "to make an album that sounded like a dark, Berlin record store discovery from the 30s. Something that had timeless emotive power, and pre-digital rawness".  And this he did, with a string orchestra, synths, electronic and tape effects, using vintage technology whenever possible - that wobbly fragility at the beginning of The Attachment comes from using a 1940s magnetic disk recorder.

Fans of Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter et al will find a lot to love here.  As in their case, it's obvious that a seasoned soundtracker is at work, but on an album untroubled by outside commissioning, the composer's ambition and love for their craft can really let loose.  Entanglement's nine pieces find Price in an often melancholy, but always evocative mood, whether focusing in on his own piano playing (the church bell-like tones of Easter) or filling out the sound with various shades of strings.  Ambient city sounds, recorded by Price on his phone, give Budapest an extra travelogue authenticity.  On two particular highlights, Maitri and The Uncertainty Principle, a guest soprano is featured (words below), which brought to mind for me Hans Abrahamsen's Let Me Tell You, or even Górecki's 3rd.  Don't miss this gorgeous album.

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Maitri

No one minded that

The flowers' beauty faded.

And I saw myself in the world grow old

As the rain went on falling.

(a waka by Ono no Komachi, 825-900)

The Uncertainty Principle

Autumn evening.

With her sleeve

She wipes a mirror.

(a haiku by Yosa no Buson, 1716-1784) 

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Union Cafe (1993)

This was the first full album I heard by the late Simon Jeffes' Penguin Cafe Orchestra, when it was given an anniversary reissue (and first outing on vinyl) by Erased Tapes last year.  The cover painting was re-photographed as above, and the album proves a good fit for what's fast becoming one of my favourite record labels ever, prefiguring their accessible-with-a-hint-of-avant-garde neo-classical bent by decades.

A handful of other PCO albums are available (like this one), and if you've watched any average amount of TV/movies/TV advertising (well, that last one largely in the UK) you'll find that their most famous tunes are already embedded in your memory many times over.  Union Cafe, however, was their final (Jeffes passed away in 1997 from a brain tumour) and grandest statement, and as far as I'm concerned should definitely be as widely known as the early stuff.

The mood across these 74 minutes is mainly sedate and melancholy, but it's a pastoral, languorous melancholy, like a benzo-spiked Pimms at summer sunset by an English country river; only getting remotely dark once (Thorn Tree Wind could pass for late-Stars Of The Lid).  There's a couple of jokers in the pack though, one of them perfectly placed at the start of the album (the brilliant boogie-woogie rave up of Scherzo & Trio) and the other halfway through, the rousing, folky Organum.  Notwithstanding Scherzo, and the 10-minute pulse of Vega, my favourites all seem to be in the second half of the album, where the shorter pieces collect - especially two gorgeous piano miniatures, Silver Star Of Bologna and Kora Kora.  Pass the Pimms!

original cover, 1993

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Masayoshi Fujita - Apalogues (2015)

Oh this one is just gorgeous.  Perfect late-Spring mellowness from Berlin-based Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita, in the second album released under his own name.  Previous releases had been under the alias El Fog, in which Fujita subjected the vibes to an array of electronic effects.  Without the alias and without all the processing though, the natural sound of his instrument is right up front and centre, with understated support here from a judiciously-used group of chamber instruments - violin, cello, clarinet, flute, french horn, accordion and snare drum.

The violinist in question is Hoshiko Yamane, a member of latter-day Tangerine Dream, and Apologues was recorded and mixed by Satoshi Okamoto aka sub-tle, who fellow Klaus Dinger aficionados will recognise as the keyboard player from Japandorf.  But enough krautrock trivia, just sit/lie back and luxuriate in this wonderful record.  At its centre is the self-descriptive Beautiful Shimmer, where Fujita plays accompanied only by reverb; everywhere else the various members of the ensemble act as perfectly-mixed cocktail ingredients into which the ice cubes of vibraphone clink around for your instant refreshment.

Apologues offers a well-balanced programme of uptempo compositions and just-slightly-melancholy meditative pieces.  It's almost impossible to pick favourites, but from the former type I'll go for the forward momentum of Flag and the jazzy Puppet's Strange Dream Circus Band, and from the latter the wine-glass-edge eerie Knight And Spirit Of Lake, and the admittedly mid-tempo opener Tears Of Unicorn.  But then I should also go for Swallow Flies High, and... argh, let's just say every track is perfection.  Each of these titles is expanded to an equally evocative little epigraph in the liner notes; no idea if they're original writings, or from Japanese folklore, but they do add another cute dimension to a stunningly lovely album.

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A Winged Victory For The Sullen - Atomos (2014)

Album #2 for A Winged Victory For The Sullen arrived three years after their debut, and saw Dustin O'Halloran and Stars Of The Lid's Adam Wiltzie refine their sound just a little in this gorgeous hour-long suite that was commissioned for a dance work.  Each track is simply numbered Atomos I - XII (with no IV), with the ten minute first part virtually comprising a suite in itself, moving through a droning intro to more animated string arrangements, to the first major feature of O'Halloran on piano, to a languid close.

The fully-intergrated orchestral sweep of AWVFTS continues to separate them from Wiltzie's previous project, such as on the aching melancholy of Atomos II, and O'Halloran's piano work continues to be thing of plaintive beauty from Atomos III onward.  My only negative on Atomos is that there ought to be more of O'Halloran on piano - but the particularly lovely Atomos IX is worth waiting for.

The major progression from the self-titled album is more of an electronic tinge, given centre stage at the outset of Atomos V before the orchestration takes over, and in the middle section of Atomos VI - wonder if their association with Robert Rath's Erased Tapes stable had anything to do with it?  There's more subtle sound effects too, in Atomos IX and X.  In any case, this album is another knockout from an inspired duo who hopefully have several more still to come.

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A Winged Victory For The Sullen - s/t (2011)

A Winged Victory For The Sullen's debut opens with a gentle, warmly embracing but melancholy string flourish - just what might be expected from a project including half of Stars Of The Lid.  It's quickly joined by some heart-tugging minimal piano - the other half of AWVFTS is pianist/composer Dustin O'Halloran.  There's more Tired Sounds-esque languorous string sweep to be had in the following two-part Requiem For The Static King, but again given a new twist in AWVFTS's more decisively neoclassical approach and O'Halloran's gorgeous Budd-like piano passages.

O'Halloran is further showcased on Minuet For A Cheap Piano No. 2, with the textures close to Nils Frahm territory, fittingly for an album that Erased Tapes picked up for European release (also appropriately, it's on Kranky in the US), as a dreamy wall of Wiltzie billows in the distance.  The album's great centrepiece is still to come, in the shape of the 12-minute A Symphony Pathetique.  An object lesson in slow-building loveliness, it's possibly the best example here of what an inspired pairing Wiltzie and O'Halloran is.

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Nils Frahm - Felt (2011)

Fingers crossed we've now seen the last of a particularly cold winter, at least round these parts - and here's the perfect album to announce the coming of spring.  Nils Frahm's first great full-length album of piano based sound exploration starts with the wonderful Keep, sounding like a finally defrosted country stream in full flow as piano, subtle electronics and I think marimba and/or xylophone combine into a kind of Steve-Reich-in-minature thing of beauty.

After this, Felt gets right down to business in letting every possible sound of the piano and its ambient environment breathe and fill out the sonic landscape.  This is where Nils got right in to having absolutely everything miked up - the insides of the piano (often prepared with the titular sheets of felt, so as not to disturb his neighbours at night), the room ambience, his own breathing and body movements - at first listen, this can seem a bit much to some ears accustomed to these extraneous sounds being excluded, but they're fully regarded as part of the music here.

Once you've got accustomed to the slightly odd sound of the piano hammers - at least, that was my initial sticking point - this method of recording enhances every track.  The gorgeous stillness of Less and Pause, the gentle rhythms of Familiar, the Erik Satie-Harold Budd-continuum loveliness of Kind - all become amplified not just sonically, but in meaning and importance, as if being allowed to witness music at a microscopic level, with previously unseen inner workings bursting into life.

As Old Thought progresses from melancholy harmonium into more xylophone and the subtlest of synth sequences, the formula seems to have been perfected - but just wait until the closing track More.  Memorably reworked as part of an epic blowout on Spaces, this original is all the more stunning for witnessing its introductory flights of notes and slow middle section up close.

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Nils Frahm - Spaces (2013)

In anticipation of the new album he's releasing later this month, here's some more Nils Frahm - previously posted was his solo piano masterpiece The Bells.  Two tracks from that album get nicely fleshed out on this patchwork-style live release (one of them tripling in length), and there's lots more to be amazed by across the 76 minutes of Spaces.  This album was my introduction to Frahm at full tilt, blending synth sequences with lightning-fingered piano improvisations and further electronic manipulation on the fly.

Occasionally this seat-of-the-pants approach doesn't take off.  It's actually to Frahm's credit (and indicative of his self-deprecating sense of humour - the sleevenotes are essential reading!) that he not only leaves in one of these failed experiments, but opens the album with it, giving a nice little snapshot of his developing craft.  When he gets into the groove though, Frahm is utterly electrifying.  Nowhere is this better displayed than on the epic medley of For-Peter-Toilet Brushes-More, which takes the third part of its title from the household objects that Frahm beats the piano strings with.  And yes, as live footage I've seen can attest, they were fresh-out-of-the-wrapper brushes.

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Nils Frahm - The Bells (2009)

Looking for the ideal wind-down for this first September weekend?  May I suggest 40 minutes of exquisite solo piano, courtesy of pianist/composer/producer Nils Frahm, born 1982 in Hamburg.  In November 2008, Frahm and composer friend Peter Broderick rented a Berlin church for two nights, capturing over five hours of Frahm's improvisations with Broderick providing idiosyncratic musical direction (at one point lying down on the piano strings).  The best of these sessions was then trimmed down to album length.

The end result clearly displays Frahm's talent for melody and harmony, and a Jarrett-esque knack for pulling instant classics out of thin air.  But even more than that, The Bells is primarily an album about exploiting the resonances of the piano and the ambient atmosphere of the church to their fullest extent.  It's certainly no mellow, Harold Budd-like chillout experience, although these moments are evident - but if you were to use this album for relaxation you'll frequently find the mood punctured by several instances of Frahm letting rip at full power, like someone taking a snooze on a churchyard bench only to be jolted awake by pealing bells.

Inspired by the recording venue, Frahm seems to enjoy these bell-like piano tones ringing through the reverberating space as majestically as possible.  I'm reminded more than once of Erik Satie's Ogives, especially a recent ECM New Series rendering by Sarah Rothenberg (the album centered around Feldman's Rothko Chapel; may post it at some point).  Stirring, invigorating stuff.

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