Jonas Ledang Information Therapy (2020)

Barracuda Triangle is a side project of three members from The Flower Kings: Tomas Bodin on keyboards, Jonas Reingold on bass/guitars and Felix Lehrmann on drums. Their debut "Electro Shock Therapy" (2014) is an instrumental album which demonstrates how talented and what amazing players they all are. The music is an eclectic mix of heavy prog, symphonic and fusion while still keeping it fairly progressive other than just going on improvising forever, there are many different ideas going through all kinds of moods, every song seems to explore different territories while still everything falls under the umbrella of heavy fusion, the music is dramatic, dark, soft, raw and unexpected with some King Crimson inspired moments…

Franz Liszt's songs remain the least-often-heard segment of his output, even as serious historians of 19th century music, including Alfred Brendel, have praised them. They are a bit uneven, and they are, for a composer who made his living with the grand gesture, uncharacteristically quiet. Various singers have taken them up, however, and this major release by Jonas Kaufmann, with the invaluable Helmut Deutsch on the piano, marks a kind of milestone. The songs are striking for how little they resemble Schumann or anything else written anywhere near the same time (until perhaps Hugo Wolf), and Kaufmann absolutely gets their originality.

One hundred tapes. Recorded by Jean Vapeur on the now legendary Nagra IV S tape recorder. A box full of the original sound recordings for Step Across the Border, the film Werner Penzel and I travelled around the world to make in 1988-1989 with musician Fred Frith. Just before the collapse of Socialism and the digital take-over of the world. Twenty minutes on every tape. That is, thirty-three hours of sound material. In the end, only ninety minutes of it are in the film. The rest of the recordings have been slumbering away in an old crate, and trailed along on our every studio move, surviving icy winters and even a flood in our archive vault. Now and again I need to clean the tape debris off the Nagra with a brush. Little piles of magnetic dust. But the sounds are still there! Wear debris, a symbol of elapsed time.