WM051: Gitarrenarmee - Composing after playing pt. 1-4
released 11 october 2006
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01.
Composing after playing part 1 |
The "Gitarrenarmee" (guitar army) does not stand for militarism, not
even for discipline. The ensemble is a free union, which exists more
in the heads of the four musicians than in the real music landscape.
The term army becomes contradicted with the fact, that it is not a
"firmly standing army", but a quartet made up of very different
characters with very different ideas. No musical piece resembles an
other, no live-set is performed twice. The "Raum-Klang-Installation"
(three-dimensional sound installation), which happened in Leipzig in
1990, forms the first high point. The experience is a volatile -
with the fading of the last sound the concept is history and
continues to live only in the heads of the then present listeners,
just as the governmental system of the GDR.
When Darjush Davar listens to the finished music for the first time,
he denies that the Gitarrenarmee played certain passages. Indeed
"Composing after Playing" is a computer product. From a
two-day-recording-session Christoph Abée extracts very different
passages, which in their inspiration span from Robert Fripps "Crafty
Guitarists" up to Neil Youngs "Dead Man". Listening, cutting and
pasting make up for a strongly compressed sound world, which could
have neither be composed before playing nor be performed at all by
four guitars at once. Two concepts of working, which usually fear to
get in contact with each other, are combined: sampling and remixing
from the world of electronic music with the free flow from jazz,
fusion and psychedelic. The result resembles a "Memory play" - with
the crucial difference that the individual motives and their mating
are not made clear. Each motive from "Composing after Playing"
unfolds and changes its character when combined with the next
motive. Now and then apparently well-known motives emerge again, get
changed within the new context and will be replaced by completely
different motives.
"Composing after Playing" nevertheless simply wants to be just
music, which functions without intellectual background or the
knowledge of the listener around its emergence. In this sense the
guitar army wishes much fun when hearing a musical work that the
four musicians would have never been able to compose or to play.
Thanks to Dominik Sroka for his technical support.
Hannover, October 2006
website:
http://www.gitarrenarmee.de
Gitarrenarmee:
Christoph Abée - guitar
Darjush Davar - guitar
Martin Fuchs - guitar
Robert Fuchs - guitar
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