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Orgelwerke

by Ted Reichman

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1.
fond du lac 08:13
2.
rondo 12:20
3.
4.

about

Orgelwerke began when composer Ted Reichman picked up a pile of rare organ vinyl from a library’s discard box. As he listened to this forgotten music late at night, he developed a process of transformation. He digitized them, turning them into loops and gestures, then reshaped them with tape, broken amplifiers and analogue echo boxes. It became something like a ritual, an exhumation of long-unheard music reanimated as glacial drones and ghostly symphonic movements — the sound of the cathedral transmuted into an enveloping shadow of pulsation, echo and glitch.

Ted Reichman composes electro-acoustic music, open-form pieces for improvising musicians, and film music. His long career in music goes back to his first recordings with Anthony Braxton in the early 1990s and his deep involvement in New York’s music community in the 2000’s. He was the original curator at Tonic on the Lower East Side of NYC, which became one of the world’s crucial venues for avant-garde music. He has made recordings for Tzadik, Skirl, and Tripticks Tapes, and produced and mixed albums for Wendy Eisenberg, Steven Long, Lina Tullgren/Alec Toku Whiting and many other experimental musicians. His film scores include Rick (with Bill Pullman and Sandra Oh), The Memory Thief, and the award winning documentaries Dear Mandela and Missing In Brooks County. He has been on the faculty of the Jazz Studies and Contemporary Musical Arts departments at the New England Conservatory of Music for over ten years, where he has developed a new curriculum on recording.

credits

released January 20, 2023

Recorded and mixed at Subtext Sound System
Thanks to Jason Coleman, Steve Long, Alec Toku Whiting, Tyler Gilmore and all at the MIT Radio Society

Mastered by Simon Scott
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft

Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music (UK) Ltd./Early Nothing (ASCAP)

Boomkat writes: "Electro-acoustic composer Ted Reichman used a discarded box of rare organ vinyl as source material for "Orgelwerke" transforming sounds using tape and broken amplifiers to create glacial drones fit for a cathedral. It's somewhere between Kali Malone and Philip Jeck. First collaborating with Anthony Braxton in the 1990s and curating the program at legendary NYC venue Tonic, Reichman has built up a reputation for film music, improvisation and electro-acoustic music. He's released music on Tzadik and Skirl, worked alongside artists like Wendy Eisenberg and Steven Long, and has been a professor at the New England Conservatory for over a decade. This level of engagement makes "Orgelwerke" far more than an exercise in contemporary organ fetishism. We know, there are plenty of artists right now clamoring for pipe, desperate to make that all-important link between church music and contemporary drone forms. "The church was the first club space," they scream. And although Reichman's story of picking up a box of rare organ vinyl is a little quaint and convenient - the stuff of press release fiction aka lazy journo catnip - his results are top notch. Reichman's chiseled, reshaped samples still retain their sacred timbre, and his thoughtful compositions never over egg the cake, moving slowly but never staying static. Gentle tape manipulation and hot, saturated distortion brings animation to the loops, and Reichman's thick drones sound as if they'd fill a space just as readily as the source material might have way back when. If you're interested in what Kali Malone, William Basinski and Philip Jeck might sound like if they were buzzed up in a blender, here's a fairly accurate answer."

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Spire London, UK

An improvised group made up of the Spire players, explores the sonics of the mighty organ, in all its thundering glory. A free range is given to the players to dive into musical territory they cannot do with scored work. Initially set up to provide links between the main sets, The Eternal Chord has evolved into one of the acts in its own right and has become a mainstay of all Spire live events. ... more

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