Estafest - Live! - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Estafest - Eno Supo [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/12/2014

The self-titled debut from Canadian solo artist Boniface is a catalogue of their most formative coming-of-age experiences - each moment captured in diary-like detail and set against a magnificently sprawling backdrop. Throughout the album, the musician/producer otherwise known as Micah Visser reflects on falling in love and facing heartbreak whilst struggling with identity, never failing to find an ineffable beauty within all the pain. The result is a body of work both bracingly honest and powerfully exhilarating. Growing up in Winnipeg, Visser wrote the songs for the album at home throughout their late teens and early twenties, after shifts at the local coffee shop and lost nights in the city. This intimacy has been preserved on Boniface, the songs largely recorded in the room they were written, and with Visser's brother Joey and longtime collaborator Micheal Dunn also on hand. After the addition of bassist Carter Dawson, Visser eventually travelled to London to finish up work on the LP with producer/engineer Neil Comber (Charli XCX, M.I.A., Glass Animals) who helped bring Boniface's lavish arrangements to full and dazzling life.

Ülo Krigul studied in Tallinn and Vienna, and has written music in a wide variety of genres. Three works on the present - And the Sea Arose, Aga vaata aina üles ('But Look Always Up') and liquid turns - were completed in 2019-20 when Krigul was composer-in-residence with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Linked by a common concept and the recycling of musical material, the three form a triptych-like set, here preceded by Vesi ise ('Water Is') from 2015. The latter is the first piece that Krigul wrote for the choir and it's conductor Kaspars Putninš and includes ideas that has been carried over into their later collaboration. If Vesi ise here functions as a prelude, liquid turns is to an extent a summation of the program the composer has sampled text and music from the two preceding works and random phrases interact and emerge as a new whole. Krigul has chosen his texts from the New Testament, the writings of the philosopher Uku Masing and the sound poetry of Ilmar Laaban.