Staff Reviews

Wolfgang Voigt - Freiland Klaviermusik

Review by Barry Toxteth

The imperfections of humanity are seemingly present, but somehow transfigured or detached, and this uncertainty of origin plays tricks on the mind, and propels the listener into a continuing state of unease.»

User reviews

• 8/10 by chrispower

Buy now from:

if experimental minimalistic dance music as we know it today had existed during the lifetime of arnold schonberg and paul hindemith, it might have sounded much like this present album. something fascinating and possibly well known about this idea, is that wolfgang voigt has a fondness for historical music like this. 'freiland-klaviermusik' stays true to the idea, maintaining its focus on music composed for the piano, but composed with a very different approach. it's once again voigt's effort to find a musical structure that eliminates the boundary between freely improvised 'virtuosic' music fine-incremental sequencing of a computer matrix. in voigt's freiland project there is one underlying theme; one single sound varied in many different ways surrounding the main basic idea of minimal-techno music: the four to the floor bass drum. in this case it's a synthetic piano, which moves between rhythmical and abstract, between deliberateness and coincidence, within a somewhat predefined structure. sometimes the clock of the bass drum does not accompany its presence at all. the present aesthetics of atonal, sometimes kafkaesque and early 20th century classical music are rather a 'pleasant by-product' than an authentic classical music statement. blasting borders and breaking rules to create apparently new revelations has always been voigt's drive. apart from his timeless preference to adopt different musical styles such as classical-music, jazz, schlager or brass music into his own music, in this case voigt's encounter with the music of the mexican composer conlon nancarrow (1912-1997) was an important influence. nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. he was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, making them play far beyond the restrictions of human performance.
description from www.roughtrade.com