In stock
LP
Reinhold FRIEDL
“Music for Piano, … Spring/Flower/Cracker/Stream”
Zeitkratzer’s boss revisits the piano guts some years after his much acclaimed and genre-defying album Inside Piano (2011). While Friedl’s first solo album defined the practice of playing on the strings of a grand piano and revealed the source of sounds we couldn’t identify on some of Zeitkratzer’s recordings, Music For Piano, … Spring/Flower/Cracker/Stream, brings concrete and quasi electroacoustic sounds together with clearly articulated piano notes. In the enigmatically titled Music For Piano, … Spring/Flower/Cracker/Stream, Reinhold Friedl moves freely from plain motifs, to walls of noise and from screeching sounds to pure tones, while keeping strong compositional structures and transparent musical forms. A truly beautiful and ear-pleasing record that unashamedly shows the composer’s and performer’s love for the piano.
Beside his activities as composer and as leader of the internationally acclaimed new music group zeitkratzer, Reinhold Friedl is renowned for his passionate and peerless piano performances. He invented numerous new techniques of playing a grand piano directly on the strings and baptised it “inside piano”. “Reinhold Friedl has developed his “inside piano” technique to such a level of delicacy and precision that the tonalities extracted from the instrument bear little resemblance of their acoustic source.”, wrote The Wire Magazine London. Phosphormagazine stated: “Unbelievable that one can creates such sounds with a grand piano!” and the Australian Realtime attested “tremendous power. Overwhelming!”
Reinhold Friedl studied with piano with Renate Werner and Paul Schwarz in Stuttgart, Alexander von Schlippenbach and Alan Marks in Berlin, composition with Mario Bertoncini (nuova consonanza) and Witold Szalonek. He has collaborated with musicians like Phill Niblock, Elliott Sharp, Alvin Lucier, Keiji Haino, Lou Reed, Carsten Nicolai, Laurie Anderson, ...
14,50€
Out of stock
LP
Reinhold FRIEDL
“String quartets”
“String Quartet 1, 2 et 3” composed by Reinhold Friedl (Zeitkratzer) and performed by Quatuor Diotima.
“Reinhold Friedl’s string quartets do not pretend to be string quartets, they are anti-Goethe. There is no sophisticated conversation of four elder gentlemen, sitting in armchairs. The music is physical work for the performers and intended to be physical pleasure for the listeners. All three quartets are based on the same idea: smooth transformations from a given texture into another one. The random-driven details vary between the pieces and the parts of the pieces. Meanwhile Reinhold Friedl developped a sotware in the frame of a PHD projects at Goldsmiths University London to help him modeling these texture transpositions.
The CD version is available here.
16,00€
Out of stock
CD
Reinhold FRIEDL
“Golden quinces, Earthed”
In April 2003, Reinhold Friedl was invited by Elke Moltrecht, the former music curator at Podewil in Berlin to perform a piano recital on the Neo-Bechstein. She had the idea to bring him together with David Balzer, a Berlin-based piano constructor, who owns a beautiful Neo-Bechstein of which there are only seventeen known exemplars world-wide. Friedl’s concept was to create an “orchestra sound” using his inside-piano-techniques on the Neo-Bechstein
About instrument: Between 1929 and 1931 the physicists Walther Nernst and his assistant Hans Driescher developed the Neo-Bechstein Grand Piano at the Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin. The idea was to construct an instrument for live radio transmission, because good quality microphones did not exist for this purpose. This was coincidently a difficult time for the piano industry. Piano makers tried to be modern and Bechstein even had their own department for electronic music instruments, as this seemed to be the future!
The main difference to a traditional piano is that instead of amplifying the strings with the help of a wooden soundboard, they are transformed by eighteen humbucker pickups into electrical signals. These signals are sent to a valve amplifier and emitted by a mono loudspeaker. As the piano did not need
a soundboard anymore, the traditional hammer mechanics had to be made differently and much lighter. A lot of sophisticated technical transformations were made. The instrument was built in co-operation with Telefunken who were responsible for the electronic devices and Bechstein who designed the mechanical parts of the instrument. No more than 150 copies of the instrument were produced and it is assumed that only a few instruments still exist, ten are now known to be in various museums. A curiosity of the instrument was the built-in radio receiver. This receiver made it possible to route both the radio signal and the instrument signal simultaneously to the output and mix them. A soundboard in a traditional piano does not only amplify the tone, it also cuts the very high frequencies and damps the oscillation of the strigs due to its mass...” Recorded mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker.
10,00€
Out of stock
CD
Reinhold FRIEDL
“Mutanza”
“This CD presents compositions for piano using the instrument in an unorthodox way. The strings are bowed with nylon strings, stimulated by E-Bows, rubbed with metal, the keys’ sound is examined as a corrugated surface and staccato rhythms are repeated in a narrow register. On the one hand, the pieces introduced here explore new ways of playing the piano. In this sense they are "enlarged playing techniques", as they have been developed for most instruments in the second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the works confine themselves to selected material and raise the question to what extent the material already is the composition. To me, it seems less interesting to answer this question, which can hardly be answered unambiguously than to observe that the development of the present music was substantially inspired by electronic music. Mario Bertoncini has expressed this, Helmut Lachenmann has introduced the concept of a "musique concrete instrumentale", Phill Niblocks’ loop-like composed music was inspired by the interference between his Harley Davidson and a droning truck ascending the serpentines of the Rocky Mountains. The present CD is a homage to electronic music and moreover, it documents attempts to clear out a gentrified piece of furniture and technically, to catapult the piano into the present”. “Guero” (Helmut Lachenmann), “Epitaff” (Reinhold Friedl), “Music in Fifths” (Philip Glass), “An American Dream” (Mario Bertoncini), “Mutanza” (Witold Szalonek), “Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings” (Alvin Lucier), “Pan Fried 11” (Phill Niblock). Co-released with Bô t Records.
10,00€