Lofofora la Distance

Germany’s most successful instrumental rock act Long Distance Calling explore the next step in their multi-faceted career with their 7th studio album ‘How Do We Want To Live?’. The band have returned with a sharply defined, artistically deep exploration of the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. In late 2020, Long Distance Calling will continue their hugely successful ‘Seats & Sounds’ tour, and this year also saw them nominated for the German Musikautorenpreis 2020 for compositional & artistic achievement. ‘How Do We Want To Live?’ carries all the bands trademarked sounds whilst at the same time revealing new, surprising and unexpected elements of the Long Distance Calling sonic landscape.

Nothing can turn back the tides of time or stop their inexorable forward grind, but music can always be relied upon to make the journey more enjoyable. LONG DISTANCE CALLING have been expressing the inexpressible for the last 16 years, ploughing their primarily instrumental furrow with the skill and dexterity of true sonic artisans.

Issued in a 4-panel Digifile. Given away for free with German magazine "RockHard" issue 07/08/2020. Exclusive Rock Hard sampler.

Francesco Landini was the most famous Florentine Trecento composer, known for being a multi-instrumentalist, notably a virtuoso on the organ. As known, he lost his sight at the age of 7 but, despite his disability, he excelled in the study of music and all liberal arts. Might the condition of blindness have affected the poetic production of Landini? La Reverdie together with Christophe Deslignes, investigate this hypothesis, with a new project that presents both well-known masterpieces and pieces never recorded before, searching for signs that might be eventually impressed in the verses and the music of Magister Coecus by the loss of his sight.

1694: the first French opera composed by a woman is premiered at the Academie royale de musique. The fateful destiny of the Greek lovers, driven to blindness and horror by the gods: Cephalus will kill Procris, whom he believes to be unfaithful, and himself… A virtuoso harpsichordist much appreciated by Louis XIV, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre chose to become a composer at a time when such freedom was virtually unheard of for a woman. Her gamble paid off, with six performances and the admiration of posterity: this flamboyant work has finally been brought back to the public by Reinoud van Mechelen.

Capella de la Torre is a German early music ensemble led by Katharina Bäuml, founded in 2005. In 2016 Katharina Bäuml and Capella de la Torre won the ECHO Klassik Ensemble des Jahres for their CD Water Music. In 2017 Capella de la Torre was awarded again with ECHO Klassik for the CD "Da Pacem" with Rias Kamerchor conducted by Florian Helgath. The ensemble is a wind ensemble, but has enlarged to include singers, lute, organ and percussion.

This recording features a work with a strange coincidence in its compositional process and an astonishing dual authorship. Remarkably, Silvius Leopold Weiss’s Lute Suite SW47 (which he named Suonata) also comes with a violin part that can be played over the top of it, composed by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. A recent comparison of sources revealed that the harpsichord part in Bach’s Suite for Violin & Harpsichord BWV1025, long considered to be of doubtful attribution, perfectly matches Weiss’s suite. The violin part, meanwhile, was indeed composed entirely by Bach and is an additional melody independent of Weiss’s musical material. It feels almost like a ‘free improvisation’ above the suite and recalls a similar process carried out by Charles Gounod in 1859: his Ave Maria fits over the first Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier BWV846. The sole exception is the Fantasia movement in Bach’s piece, which is not derived from Weiss’s suite, meaning both the violin and harpsichord parts in it are unique to Bach.

1694: the first French opera composed by a woman is premiered at the Academie royale de musique. The fateful destiny of the Greek lovers, driven to blindness and horror by the gods: Cephalus will kill Procris, whom he believes to be unfaithful, and himself… A virtuoso harpsichordist much appreciated by Louis XIV, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre chose to become a composer at a time when such freedom was virtually unheard of for a woman. Her gamble paid off, with six performances and the admiration of posterity: this flamboyant work has finally been brought back to the public by Reinoud van Mechelen.

The Monteverdi contemporary Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) is now unfortunately almost exclusively seen as an important and influential composer of works for keyboard instruments, but he also composed both sacred and secular vocal music throughout his entire creative period.