Nicolas Kssis Martov

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.

For the first time in four years, we have a proper Nicolas Jaar album: Cenizas. The latest entry from the Chilean-American composer neé DJ is both the end of a drought and the capstone on an incredible run.
As an album, Cenizas wanders, floats, drifts. Jaar’s work has always been experimental, but this record is without a doubt his most “challenging,” rife with exercises in drone, ambient, and noise, often at the same time. In many cases the only punctuation in these songs is the smooth arrival of Jaar’s lilting baritone, a soothing voice hovering in the abyss. Historically, Jaar’s most exciting songs have often featured some moment of lift-off, where an unexpected instrument arrives, the drum kicks in, or a beat picks up…

As an introduction to these recordings Namoradze writes: "This album presents some of my reflections on the work of Robert Schumann, from both pianistic and compositional viewpoints. The program is centered on two arabesques, and the structure of the recital is itself reminiscent of an arabesque-like texture, interleaving Schumann’s work with my own. The opening sunrise of Schumann’s Songs of Dawn is followed by a pair of arabesques, Schumann’s work exerting an influence on aspects of the formal structure of my piece of the same name. Two considerably more virtuosic and extroverted selections complete the program: Schumann’s monumental Humoreske, followed by three of my piano etudes."

Jean-Nicolas Diatkine comes from a family of recognised doctors and considers commitment to others to be the basis of his profession. It seemed impossible for him to do without this basic attitude in the exercise of his profession, which is why he always sees his artistic development as a return to the essential artistic values to which he has devoted himself over the last thirty years. At the same time, he makes the in-depth study and deeper understanding of the narrative of each composer an absolute priority and an indispensable step before any public performance of a work.

The Enescu Project began life in the concert hall and has now been faithfully recorded to create this album. The programme is devoted to the music of the great Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, and to that of his contemporaries and friends, creating a sense of the context in which Enescu was composing. Enescu studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Massenet and Fauré; rubbed shoulders and shared a stage with Bartók and Ravel; was the dedicatee of a sonata by Ysaÿe; and Debussy attended the premiere of Enescu’s First Symphony. Music by these composers, for different instrumental combinations, leads us to the focus of the album: Enescu’s beautiful Octet for strings, a work composed when he was only 19 and which had a profound impact on violinist Nicolas Dautricourt when he first heard it. Dautricourt is joined for this recording by a gathering of exceptional string players, and the album booklet includes a QR code that takes listeners to the spoken texts included in the original concert version of this fascinating project.