Baltic Sounds

Memories — places, vacancies, allusions — are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. The Los Angeles-based harpist recorded her breakout 2016 album, At The Dam, during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented Collected Pieces, a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station — a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — emanates Hundreds of Days, her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world.

Astrowind’ Sound designer from Latvia Kriipis Tulo creates an amazing, deeply emotional and romantic music with help of vintage analog synthesizers and open-reel tape recorder. There is a feel of acroamatic escapism, there are these huge chords of hissing analogue synthesizers and you can even find this special kind of Slavonian melancholia (or Baltic, respectively) people use to rave about. Astrowind bring up a lot of references in their beautiful and, well, obsolete music. Astrowind Project got the harmonies and the sound to become one of the most interesting Baltic acts to emerge from a scene rich of innovative musicians (Muschraum, Joel Tammik, Selffish, to name just the most obvious)…

The pieces of music on this live album were recorded during the concert tour of the Finnish composer, Tomi Räisänen in North Germany in 2014 and 2015, organised by Neue Musik im Ostseeraum (Lübeck). The tour documented the composer’s long-time collaboration and connection with Northern Germany, or as one perhaps can say more descriptively, from a Finnish perspective, with the Southern Baltic Sea.

Music of the transition: An interesting compilation presented here by Daniel Huppert and the Bergische Symphoniker. The 2nd Violin Concerto by Sergei Prokofiev (soloist: David Nebel), is combined with Symphony No. 25 by Nikolai Myaskovsky. The programme is complemented by the arrangement of the piece "Masks" from Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" for violin and orchestra, made especially for this recording.