Freiland Klaviermusik

Wolfgang Voigt // Profan
Format // CD

Wolfgang Voigt will also be presenting a special edition of his Freiland Klaviermusik that will be released exclusively at Kompakt.fm. Limited to 175 copies, this special edition will include a hand-signed and hand-painted Ep of Freiland Geduld with a remix by DJ Koze, plus a copy of Freiland Klaviermusik, the full length CD. This limited edition 12"+CD will be available only at Kompakt.fm from June 25th.

If experimental minimalistic dance music as we know it today had existed during the lifetime of Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith, it might have sounded much like this present album. Something fascinating and possibly well known about this idea, is that Wolfgang Voigt has a fondness for historical music like this. Freiland-Klaviermusik stays true to the idea, maintaining its focus on music composed for the piano, but composed with a very different approach. It's once again Voigt's effort to find a musical structure that eliminates the boundary between freely improvised "virtuosic" music and fine-incremental sequencing of a computer matrix. In Voigt's Freiland project there is one underlying theme; one single sound varied in many different ways surrounding the main basic idea of minimal-techno music: the four to the floor bass drum. In this case it's a synthetic piano, which moves between rhythmical and abstract, between deliberateness and coincidence, within a somewhat predefined structure. Sometimes the clock of the bass drum does not accompany its presence at all. The present aesthetics of atonal, sometimes Kafkaesque and early 20th century classical music are rather a "pleasant by-product" than an authentic classical-music statement. Blasting borders and breaking rules to create apparently new revelations has always been Voigt's drive. Apart from his timeless preference to adopt different musical styles such as classical-music, jazz, schlager or brass music into his own music, in this case Voigt's encounter with the music of the Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) was an important influence. "Nancarrow is best remembered for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, making them play far beyond the restrictions of human performance." In Nancorrows work, Voigt found strong parallels to his own; the search for unpredictability and spontaneity, often affecting his way of working, to find a symbiosis between man and machine. This approach has also influenced Voigt's work as a visual artist. The front cover of the record presents an excerpt from one of Voigt's Tetrapak-paintings, in which he covers, combines, and confronts a predetermined mechanical structure (pattern, wallpaper = loop, pattern) with more or less a free, progressive, and rhythmic painting technique. The current releases on Voigt's re-launched nineteen-nineties label PROFAN together with the reunion of his music with his lesser known work as a performing artist represent that in 2010,Voigt sees minimal- music through the perspective that it actually relates to minimal-art much more than minimal-techno. It could also be that Voigt believes that art can express complication and pain in ways that the minimal-techno of today cannot. Because of its comparatively higher level of "accessibility," previously released on the Kompakt compilation series "Total," the track "Geduld" is somewhat of an exception to the piece. This is why Geduld was chosen for the twelve-inch pressing. DJ Koze has created an incomparable remix that has the potential to make this track a massive floor-filler and in doing so he has effectively integrated all of the relevant and original piano parts of the track. Together with the original version and the hypnotic minimal track "Verwandlung," the twelve-inch Profan 33 Geduld Remix will be released alongside its CD counterpart. The release date of ProfanCD9 will also signify the debut of Wolfgang Voigt's first official website (www.wolfgang-voigt.com) , which will present to this date, the most extensive overview of Voigt's artistic work and philosophy. Previously released in 2008 was the prerelease twelve-inch: PROFAN 30 - Wolfgang Voigt - Freiland Klaviermusik Beside the official twelve-inch release of PROFAN 33 GEDULD-REMIX there will a very limited (less than 200 copies) hand painted and hand signed issue, which includes a free version of the CD. This record will only be available at Kompakt.fm.
  • Released // June 7, 2010
  • Format // CD
  • Catalog Nr // PROFAN CD 9
  • EAN // 880319467226