The following section is what I internally called the “Bela-Paul-Gustav” section, as the first three tracks take a shared musical idea and refine that using ideas from compositional work by Bela Bartok, Paul Hindemith and Gustav Mahler.
9. Mein Lieblingsmetzger
Using two atonal themes reminiscent of the later “Mikrokosmos” pieces by Bartok, subjecting them to basic counterpoint treatment, and arranging that for organ, that is was this track is about.
Now I don’t know anything about pipe organs (registration etc.), so I consulted not one, but two subject matter experts. One, Dr. Bruno Sommhammer, is a radiologist who received his MD in neurology waybackwhen from my father, and is not only an altogether fantastic guy, but also musical director of a church in Berlin – and a huge fan of Bach (as am I).
The second one, Lauren Redhead, is once again a twitter contact – I believe via Christine (?). She’s active mainly as a composer, but has a huge knowledge both as a composer for and a player of organs.
Now neither of those had access to an organ that would do the work justice: enter Hauptwerk (a VST virtual organ), of which there is a free version and some free models (in my case, St. Anne’s Mosley).
This is, I might add, a hugely dynamic track!
As for the title: this means “my favourite butcher” and refers to a small butcher’s here in Würzburg Hätzfeld.
10. Paul (für Paul)
Once upon a time, Jan Kühner and I considered a duo album for electric guitar and grand piano. While this project has successively moved down the priority list down to a point where it lost feasibility, some of the pieces I’ve written for it remained – like Paul (für Paul).
The title here says it all: this composition borrows a lot of the harmonic language from early Hindemith works, especially the use of clustered fourths in the guitar/piano interplay. Interestingly, the arrangement resembles (accidentally or incidentally) the one of Mein Lieblingsmetzger. All of the parts have been recorded by me as a kind of mockup to discuss with Jan, but I wasn’t unhappy with what I had here and decided to use it.
The electric guitar is my trusted Ibanez superstart sent through a stack of four POD-Farm amplifiers with “everything on 11″. Rock on!
The Superstrat on Eleven
11. To Your Dunkles
Four trombones and a lead synthesizer. The lead synthesizer is a Kurzweil K2600XS with a modified version of the JordanLead patch, the trombones are Bach B42 – all played by me.
Musically, it’s rather simple, at least at first sight. The chord voicings here borrow from Gustav Mahler’s work (especially “Lied von der Erde” and “Symphonie Nr.4″) – and it fits well into the Bela-Paul-Gustav group…
12. Halbwegs Leer
I’ve known Daryl Shawn from the Looper’s Delight mailing list. He was one of the first to join my kybermusik project (and contributed to the Virtual Baggy Pants track), and I also brought him together with Jim Goodin for their Chinapainting project.
I’ve known Daryl Shawn as a person specializing in “nylon string guitar and cassette abuse”, which for all I knew meant generating noises with a guitar, recording them onto a dictaphone and then hardware-bending that. Boy was I surprised when I found that Daryl was actually doing some beautiful “singer-songwriter-without-singing” music.
This was a quick one: I wrote a few bars for acoustic guitar, he played it – it’s beautiful. Life can be so simple…
Life is good with a good guitarist