Swr Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart Swf Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden & Freiburg Ensemble Reflex - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The Standard - Wire Post to Wire [COMPACT DISCS] date 03/23/2004

The fact that Genoël von Lilienstern's childhood falls in the 1980s is proven by his portrait album in many ways On the one hand, it is synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 that shape the aesthetics and sound of his works; on the other hand, the radio, as the supplier for countless mixtapes at the time, is the focus, sometimes directly, sometimes more hiddenly. Booklet author Julian Kämper refers to their special quality when he describes von Lilienstern's recourse to pop cultural artifacts and practices of the Eighties InchThanks to the new studio facilities of that decade, a distinctive sound was newly defined and perfected, a sound which, von Lilienstern maintains, has 'never mouldered away' and has remained all-pervasive to the present day through ceaseless daily bombardment on radio and television, in department stores and on the internet.Inch In InchVoz ComercialInch, for example, the Berlin composer uses transcriptions of radio commercials from Mexico and Peru; in InchBig PictureInch, in turn, a one-hour recording of worldwide Internet radio stations serves as the source material. In both works, the vocals of Johanna Vargas respectively Soetkin Elbers, take on a central role and, in their interplay with the Ensemble Garage, evoke an image that oscillates between excessive consumer society and acoustic reflection. In the two other pieces on the portrait album - InchCoutureInch and InchTopInch - synthesizers dominate von Lilienstern uses them as sound generators of a bygone era. In the case of Couture, they mix with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, so that the individual musical sources are sometimes no longer discernible.

SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Symphony Orchestra - Les Ballets Russes 2 [COMPACT DISCS] date 05/13/2008