Beauty In Simplicity

KAI SCHUMACHER

Some 50 years ago composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley were responsible for one of the last great radical changes in twentieth-century music. They liberated contemporary music from the dogmatic clutches of serialism and gave it a new simplicity of compositional structure and harmony, repetitive elements and an uncompromising reduction of the musical material. Hence “Minimal Music” became timeless in two senses: like a perpetuum mobile, once set in motion it appears to be able to remain endlessly in motion from within, and develops in the process an almost psychedelic pull that knows neither beginning nor end. At the same time, with its patterns, loops and drones, it smoothed the path for genres like ambient, techno and post-rock. On this release, rather than relying on digital sound, Kai Schumacher treats the concert grand as a fully analogue synthesizer, applying preparations and sound processing to what is surely the most classical of all instruments to generate apparently electronic sound worlds in the space between drum-machine and the Wall of Sound.

Price: $27.98

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