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Carl Craig & Moritz - Recomposed

I think this is a great album for pure listening. I play it at night and in the morning while reading. Its very emotive and unobtrusive. Anyone else feelin?

http://www.discogs.com/Carl-Craig-M...ed/master/15470

Yes. Top 3 albums of 2008 IMO

i have yet to understand why everyone is so uncritical about the trumpet parts. they totally ruin it for me. before, the intro is great, after, the more clubby stuff is really good too. but the trumpets are so sharp, i can't stand listening to the cd from the beginning to the end but no one seems to bother

trumpets were the big thing last year if you judge the amount of releases that used them. They don't kill me in this album, but they are not my favourite part either.

I think trumpets can work, but most of the time they are just thrown in and do not fit. This is still a great album imo.

quote:

Originally posted by lenazi trumpets were the big thing last year if you judge the amount of releases that used them. They don't kill me in this album, but they are not my favourite part either. I think trumpets can work, but most of the time they are just thrown in and do not fit. This is still a great album imo.

i still don't feel fully understood how can you not find the pitched trumpet parts in movement 2 and 3 annoying? they are useless, hectic and not even in harmony

i would say that the rest of the album more than makes up for that.

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Originally posted by alexf i have yet to understand why everyone is so uncritical about the trumpet parts. they totally ruin it for me. before, the intro is great, after, the more clubby stuff is really good too. but the trumpets are so sharp, i can't stand listening to the cd from the beginning to the end but no one seems to bother

I agree that the trumpets are annoying at best. I believe on the vinyl version they fall on side B somewhere. My girl always gives me a pissed off look during that section of the mix. I've been sticking to sides C and D. I'm not sure which movements they correlate to but there's some uber brilliant material in that section. I think its enough to make up for the trumpets

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Originally posted by lenazi i would say that the rest of the album more than makes up for that.

yes, that is a good thing, and i am listening right now from the (bought) cd. but i still wonder what they were thinking with those trumpets. moritz von oswald never incorporates such harsh parts in his music, he always uses warm sounds and the mastering is pleasant, too. and carl craig usually isn't rioting either. maybe it's different here because universal did the mastering (on a side note, the album tends to be overcompressed, too). or maybe i have to accept that they wanted to have a striking part on their album which was not supposed to please everybody

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Originally posted by Guest I agree that the trumpets are annoying at best. I believe on the vinyl version they fall on side B somewhere. My girl always gives me a pissed off look during that section of the mix. I've been sticking to sides C and D. I'm not sure which movements they correlate to but there's some uber brilliant material in that section. I think its enough to make up for the trumpets

oh i see, maybe i shoud've bought the vinyl version instead. makes it easier to leave out unloved parts by now i consistently buy the vinyl versions when there's the choice, but last year i still thought different

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Originally posted by alexf maybe i have to accept that they wanted to have a striking part on their album which was not supposed to please everybody

i would say this. like i already mentioned trumpets were en vogue during the time of this release.

cadenza wasn't even the label that started the trumpet craze, nor did Villalobos release anything like this on the label...but ok i'll take the word of someone who starts a thread about how he was excited to buy marc houle - techno vocals 2 years after it was relevant (but still never good).

what type of instrument and style of sound is used for a jester falling on his ass?

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Originally posted by Guest They were probably part of the original composition that Recomposed is based off of

yes, sure

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...leave them in

lol, i'd say the opposite. there were hundreds of parts to choose from. and on a side note, electronic music, or at least this type of composition, is about bringing together parts from different sources, so i think it's technically impossible to "leave something in"

Movement 5 is the best part of this. Moritz's influence comes through when that deep warm bass starts creepin in. Unbelievable release!!

Listen starting around 2:30 in this youtube clip

Good post Mark. Movement 5 (Part 2) is genius art. Carl Craig's remix of Movement 8 is pretty awesome. I've listened to most of the tracks on ReComposed and it was probably the most innovative techno album of last year, something much needed in the scene. It was a tough job to attempt what they did but I think they did a great job at fusing techno and classical. Remixes from the release.

Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald - Villalobos "Uli, Mein Ponyhof" RMX



Movement 8 - C2 remix



Side note, saw Echospace play last night - it was epic! They were dropping one deep dub after another.

refuse...I'm huge into the C2 remix of Movement 8. If I listen to recomposed I notice that Movement 8 consists of themes taken from the entire recomposed album. It ties them all together, taking bits and snippets from each. The louder you turn up Movement 8, the more apparant some of the elements become.

I'm not a huge fan of the Ricardo mix...but if I had to divide his works down the middle and say half are good, half are bad, this one is in the top half.

Did you take any vids of Echospace? If you dont mind, can you give details on the night? How do they manage to play only dub tracks and keep people interested? How many people/how large the venue? How was the mong factor? Does everyone there trainspot them the whole time?

I personally think that I've listened to enough of their music that I'd be ready to go and see them live. I dont know that the average clubber would be able to handle a straight dub techno set. You have to unwind and move to a more patient mindset before that music can hit the right way. Sometimes its not possible for me to get to that place when listening at home and I have to walk away.

Echospace live, you say? Sounds trippy as. I also wonder how well an hour of his productions would hold attention spans but I'm intrigued nonetheless.

I just discovered there's an insert in the packaging for recomposed pack that details the production process. Here it is. I tried to break it out in paragraphs to keep it organized:

"ReComposed is the result of a gradual process, even the 'Intro' was set down at the very first session -- in Detroit, Michigan, which is and has been the center of the development of Afro-American techno music for about 20 years. And it was about 20 years ago that the recordings by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra of the works, which the two artists have used for their project, were released for the first time on CD. Moritz von Oswald told me that the commissioning company wanted them to use an historic recording by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan's baton, but that he expressed the wish to use unmixed multi-track recordings in order to better employ the various instruments. Sure enough, recordings (with 16 separate tracks) of this nature existed, among them precisely the three works that Moritz von Oswald and Carl Craig, whom Moritz spontaneously invited to work on the project with him, wanted to use: Maurice Ravel's 'Bolero' and 'Rapsodieespagnole,' and Modest Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' in Ravel's orchestration.

After a first meeting in Moritz's home town, Berlin, where they listened to the original Deutsche Grammophon recordings from 1985, 1986 and 1987, Moritz set to work on the pre-production of various bits and pieces they had chosen, isolating certain instruments or groups of instruments, separating them out from various microphone-tracks, and mixing them anew. Then he took everything to Carl Craig in Detroit where the two musicians (both highly acclaimed techno innovators ever since the birth of the genre) sat down with their instruments -first and foremost a synthesizer, then old, analogue but, (as Carl Craig told me)legendary drum machines, and traditional percussion such as woodblocks and chime bells, even a double-bass -- and improvised a prelude during which sounds and patterns were created, reminiscent of Brian Eno's collaboration 30 years ago with the German electronic duo Cluster, and which I should like to call Common or Garden Electronics (in contrast to cultivated Techno Soul) and which was in those days a minor German export hit following in the wake of Krautrock. Carl Craig had already had a great success in the early 1990s with a version of Manuel G�ttsching's historic (if not epochal) post-Kraut/proto-house title E2E, which Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus later remixed. (What a wonderful term -- Afro-Germanic -- which arose out of the afro-diasporic Underground Resistance-Zentralkomitee!)

An everyday situation: one goes out of the house into the road and immediately recognizes a good friend approaching. My first thought is often to cross over the road, hopefully unnoticed, or even duck into a house entrance. And I had a similar feeling with the first appearance of the percussive, repetitive Bolero motif following the introduction. Here is the first clear indication that samples were used, and in this case precisely how the composer had intended, how he had meant them. (I had the same sort of feeling with the following track, where the trumpets are taken from Mussorgksy's Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.) But I soon overcame my irritation and plunged happily into the hypnotic maelstrom of the slowly unfolding 'Movement 1.' It is certainly interesting that sampling often employs a blatant motif which is then worked on with imagination, and taken beyond recognition, which in turn often leads to something new (better, not merely borrowed). I asked Moritz if this was not rather similar to classical music, where leitmotifs are employed. He replied that that was the whole point of the exercise (creating by doing). The tonal leitmotif of the composition (except for a secondary motif on the harp) was dropped on account of it being too obvious (for fruitful re-use). The rhythmic patterns of 'Bolero' were another matter, however; for Moritz von Oswald, 'Bolero' is the very first classical composition with a rhythmic loop upon which a melody is built. Carl Craig also declared that this leitmotif was absolutely indispensable. Suddenly, the sound explodes way beyond that produced by a classical orchestra: subsonicbasses slide over the musical seabed.

Movement 2: Enter the Goldenberg/Schmuyle trumpets, partly as on the historical original track, but also looped, tuned, pitched and layered. And quite clearly, for all to hear, layered on top of one another we have 'Bolero,' 'Rapsodieespagnole' and 'Pictures at an Exhibition.' The whole 'friendly takeover' of the originalBolero (particularly recognizable from the rhythmic snare patterns) now possesses a certain swiftness and is high-pitched, which leads Moritz von Oswald to conclude that the well-known, popular recordings of 'Bolero' have always been performed more slowly than the composer originally intended: this music really should have 128 beats per minute. Premiered in 1928, right in the middle of the Jazz Era and already influenced by jazz, it had a great influence on the further development of jazz and on such genial forerunners of the Third Stream as the young cornettist and pianist Bix Beiderbecke. (Frank Trumbauer turned in his seat, caught Bix's attention, and nodded at an expensively dressed, bearded man, obviously not an American, who had entered and was standing with a group of Victor officials listening to the music. 'Say, Bix, any idea who that is?' Trumbauer's smile betrayed immediately that he knew something Bix had better know too, and fast. 'Nope. Looks French to me.' 'Very astute, old boy. That's Maurice Ravel.' Ravel, whose music he all but worshipped. A key figure in the French Impressionist school, master orchestrator, harmonic innovator, composer of 'Ma M�rel'Oye' and the 'Daphnis and Chloe' suites; this man's genius had produced the monumental orchestral setting of Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition.' 'Oh, my God,' said Bix. 'It really is.' 'Why don't you ask him for his autograph?' said Charlie Margulis, amused at his section mate's unconcealed awe. Bix shook his head. 'I couldn't. I mean, I wouldn't dare.' That evening, Bix, Roy Bargy and other Paul Whiteman sidemen went to hear Ravel conduct the New York Philharmonic, and later spotted the composer in a speakeasy. This time Bix was not too shy to try an approach, but advanced on his table with an almost fierce determination. 'Excuse me, sir. I'm Bix Beiderbecke. May I sit down?' Ravel, presumably too surprised to even think of a reason why not, indicated an empty chair. The two were soon engrossed in animated conversation, which began with Bix saying, quite audible several tables away, 'I love everything you've ever done.' It is not certain whether the two men saw one another again, though at least one account has Ravel visiting Bix's flat in 1931 to listen to play his own piano works.

Movement 3 begins with an elegant rhythm, pepped up with bright synthetic hi-hats, which is reminiscent of the Rhenish group Kraftwerk (the Afro-German heroes of Motor City), whirling trumpets join in (see Duke Ellington's 'Trumpets No End'), and then quite suddenly a sonorous bubbling sound rises up out of the musical depths and emerges on the sparkling surface -- rather like an echo of early acid house music (have you discovered the BASF-tape at the bottom right of the cover?) -- a very welcome sound for me, which is repeated several times in the next few minutes, starts to become dominant, even silencing the brass from Goldenberg and Schmuyle and -- at last -- allows the bass drum to enter. Question: where are the samples from Deutsche Grammophon? OK, there's a very soft, little woodwind motif, but the tribal slit gong is certainly not Ravel's. Nor is the fluffy orchestra from the Intro, which pops up again to prepare us for the seamless transition to track 5 of the album, 'Movement 4,' the powerful, down-to-earth club track, the single we all want to dance to. And it is not in the least strange but liberating that now, after the 25 well-thought-out minutes which have brought us here, that all references to classical music are done away with -- and we've landed in a club. I asked Carl Craig if that was planned right from the start, and he answered: It just happened. It's all very elegant now, the bubbling sound from of the depths return, something in the music definitely begins to jack, and the fleet-footed Kraftwerk-like sound is treated to a fairly drastic saw-toothed embellishment.

Movement 4: to couple this out for a 12" vinyl LP would be logical. Perhaps, said Moritz, when I suggested this to him, and maybe with other remixes, which would carry on from this one (or lead elsewhere). I will definitely buy them, but then: I buy everything that Moritz von Oswald and Carl Craig have produced (and that is quite a lot) on their own labels (Basic Channel, with its various other sub-labels in Berlin, in partnership with Mark Ernestus, and Carl Craig's Planet-E in Detroit) and so I more or less have a whole series of their projects (mutual remixes) going back to 1993.

Over the period of one year, Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald visited one another in Berlin and Detroit, where they created loops and made improvisations on them (just as jazz musicians do, although Carl Craig prefers to talk of jamming and not jazz music; I don't quite agree, but then, I have always considered even his earliest, completely synthetic tracks, where he jams with himself, as jazz). They opted for certain takes, which they left unchanged, and from these, they developed and set down further tracks. If one listens carefully here, a huge arch emerges which is brought to a happy conclusion.

An Interlude, filled with drones, clusters and other sonic effects, which produce a pleasant cloud of sound, prepares the way for the two last, very lengthy pieces, and it is interesting to learn that each of the final movements was mixed by just one man: Carl Craig is responsible for the opulent Movement 5, in which its classical origins are overwhelmed here and there by heroic-sounding, symphonic strikes, and one is transported to the parallel world of four-to-the-floor music; and (introduced by a cross fade) Moritz von Oswald puts his name to 'Movement 6,' which is more minimalistic, and more abstract despite prominent, almost waltz-like congas. That's quite right, said Carl, but unimportant -- it's still teamwork."

--Thomas Meinecke, September 2008

Thanks. They sampled Ravel's "Bolero?" This I have to hear. That is one of my childhood firsts and faves in the realm of classical.

Thanks man, i fucked up my eyes reading but it was worth it.

quote:

Originally posted by shonguiz Thanks man, i fucked up my eyes reading but it was worth it.

I felt the same. The font in the insert is about 5 point. Took me forever to finish it.

I can remove the bold above if you think it will help?

One interesting take away from that review is that the author also had trouble dealing with the trumpets. I think the trumpets are there as the vegetables that you're supposed to eat. They dont taste good but they are good for you. Then in Movements 5 and 6 you are able to induldge in dessert

Response.

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Originally posted by vinnie97 Echospace live, you say? Sounds trippy as. I also wonder how well an hour of his productions would hold attention spans but I'm intrigued nonetheless.

They played at LA's first off serious house and techno festival, Convention 101, a three day event starting 9.18.9 - 9.20.9 - the equivalent of Decibel Fest in Seattle and DEMF in Detroit. Hosted by Compression and Giant, this was LA's first attempt at such an ambitious endeavor to create its own DEMF-styled festival with its own personality and flavor. The theme was integrating house and techno from Europe and America into one while staying true and paying tribute to the original sound of Detroit. Therefore it was only appropriate to have 'The Originator' Juan Atkins headlining the Planetary Stage. (http://convention101.com)

Friday 9.18.09 @ Vanguard - 1st night, pre-party - Robert Hood, Orlando Voorn, Joel Mull, Compression residents, and Sean Palm was scheduled but must have had schedule complications because he never made it. Saturday, 9.19.09, 2nd day (main festival) The space was classic warehouse themed at the heart of downtown LA with superb security and divided into two stages: Planetary Stage (outdoor stage) - dedicated for artists representing homegrown American techno/house/electro with Joel Mull as the Swedish exception. His sound fit the mood of the artists playing perfectly so I figure that's the reason he played on this stage. Other artists that played on the Planetary Stage: Drumcell [LA, Droid], Developer [LA, Modularz], Detroit Grand Pubahs, DeepChord presents Echospace, [a]pendics.shuffle, Joel Mull mentioned above, and a closing DJ set by the Originator himself, Juan Atkins.

The Compression Stage (indoor sage) - representing the sound of Europe with a heavy emphasis on the Berlin sound, this was the tech-house, minimal tech, deep house, and techno stage. Artists featured on this stage were: Acid Circus [LA, Droidbehavior], Matt Xavier & Andre Ezer (Compression, LA), Voodeux (live), Jamie Jones (live), Mistress Barbara, Wighnomy Brothers and Paco Osuna live.

DeepChord presents Echospace's set was really imaginative, contemplative, deep, dubby - they played Intrusion cuts, CV313, DeepChord, Soultek, Sunset by Echospace. People were really digging it and grooving out to it. Remember this is a mature crowd who understands and loves this music and wants to be there, practically everyone in attendance wholeheartedly wanted to be there. There were some out-of-towners from Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, and more cities. Echospace's set started out spacey and ethereal at first with the twisted synths and chord progression they are known and loved for, which proceeded dubby basslines, spacey pads, deep atmospheric soundscapes and overall a very enjoyable listening experience. They also delved into minimal and played some slower techno. 3/4 of their set was really interesting, the other time I was hopping back and forth between the rooms. These are the time slots posted for the festival give or take about 30 to 45 minutes pushed back between time slots listed.





The 3rd day and final day of Convention, Sunday 9.20 held at The Standard Rooftop - Downtown LA. Considered 'The Afterparty' of the festival with artists Kate Simko, Jamie Jones, Mistress Barbara and Wighnomy Brothers headlining. Unfortunately I was too burned out and too busy to make it to this one. But it looked like a lot of fun nonetheless. A few of my friends took pictures of all three days, I'll post some when they are up.

That sounds awesome, thanks for the review. Did you manage to catch Voodeux? Like you, I would have had trouble staying confined to only one room.

Nope, he was the only live act I didn't catch. Would have been nice though Arrived with a half hour to go in [a]pendics.shuffle's set anxiously awaiting Echospace and Mistress Barbara playing in the Compression Stage.

Thanks for posting those notes, interesting read.

quote:

Originally posted by refuge Nope, he was the only live act I didn't catch. Would have been nice though Arrived with a half hour to go in [a]pendics.shuffle's set anxiously awaiting Echospace and Mistress Barbara playing in the Compression Stage.

Ah, unfortunate. Them actually (unless one couldn't make it), Jamie Watts (KiloWatts) and Tanner Ross.

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