Florian Weiss - Maybe - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Florian Boesch possesses a sensuously attractive baritone voice, first-rate diction and remarkable acting ability. Following on his acclaimed album of Loewe songs, Boesch is joined again by Roger Vignoles for an album of Schubert Lieder. Der Wanderer focuses on the composer's darker songs. They encapsulate a recurrent theme of German Romantic art that of the rootless outsider. It is the world of Goethe's mysterious Harper and Mignon, and of the solitary, silhouetted figures in the darker landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In music it found it's supreme expression, not only in Schubert's Winterreise but in these many individual 'wandering' songs some grimly resigned, some serenely contemplative, others imbued with a sense of physical and spiritual isolation and longing for an ultimately unattainable 'otherness.'

Nearly a decade after their last album, Lilacs and Champagne picks up right where that record, Midnight Features Vol. 2 Made Flesh, left off. With bizarre excursions into pillowy, sentimental made-for-TV music - and children's choirs incanting the blackest dread-filled music the band has conjured to date - Fantasy World is both transcendent and traumatic. Despite sharing two founding members of Grails (multi-instrumentalists Emil Amos and Alex Hall) Fantasy World only peripherally resembles their core group. Lilacs & Champagne have exaggerated their early record's implications and accelerated their mercurial rearranging of music history by deftly incorporating live instrumentation and samples with equal amounts of deference and disregard. Previously existing primarily in a realm adjacent to instrumental hip-hop (J Dilla, Clams Casino, Madlib), Fantasy World exposes Lilacs & Champagne's deeper lineage as playful tape-collage culture jammers in the vein of legendary sound satirists, Negativland and Severed Heads. It embraces the effect of a child entering a dollar store the immediate euphoria felt upon discovering the seemingly endless aisles piled impossibly high with novelty toys, utensils, party decorations, and toiletries eventually gives way to the overwhelming realization that they're actually just a tourist in a perilous mountain of colorful garbage. From those mountains, Lilacs & Champagne mold monuments to curiosity and confusion.

Harald Weiss, composer, percussionist, and stage director, applies his artistic energies at the dividing line between music and theater. An experienced composer and performer, he smuggles musical material into visual environments and creates figures for the stage that quietly or restlessly occillate between audible and visible worlds. Peter Müller piano / Cyklus / Carina Mora sopran / Mandolinenorchester Bielefeld / Harald Weiss pecussion, voice.