Hermann Keller
Schwebungen Brechungen
Edition RZ (Germany) 1987
EDRZ 10001 (LP)
sleeve : NM
media : EX+/EX+(some slightly noise.)
Composer/pianist Hermann Keller, born in former East Germany, began his career as a jazz musician in the early 1970s and went on to establish himself as an improviser through participation in groups such as the Berliner Improvisations-Quartett and the Michel Sell Orchester. Still active today, he released this solo album in 1987 on Edition RZ, the label that issued numerous masterpieces of contemporary and avant-garde music from the mid-1980s onward. This work is a free improvisation using the prepared piano—an instrument said to have been pioneered by John Cage—in which small cymbals, nails, and other metallic objects are placed between the strings of a grand piano. Keller plays with a percussive imagination: striking the strings and keys with hammers, rubbing them with metal tubes, and more. The result is a music of “resonance,” where uniquely full reverberations, dully trembling sawtooth-like tones, percussive blows that transform the piano into a drum, and even unusual sounds created by pressing the tip of a recorder against a plate laid on the keys, scatter through space in a whirlwind of inventive sonic ideas.
A1: Ex Tempore VI Und Anrufung
B1: Sduvebringen/Breduingen
Schwebungen Brechungen
Edition RZ (Germany) 1987
EDRZ 10001 (LP)
sleeve : NM
media : EX+/EX+(some slightly noise.)
Composer/pianist Hermann Keller, born in former East Germany, began his career as a jazz musician in the early 1970s and went on to establish himself as an improviser through participation in groups such as the Berliner Improvisations-Quartett and the Michel Sell Orchester. Still active today, he released this solo album in 1987 on Edition RZ, the label that issued numerous masterpieces of contemporary and avant-garde music from the mid-1980s onward. This work is a free improvisation using the prepared piano—an instrument said to have been pioneered by John Cage—in which small cymbals, nails, and other metallic objects are placed between the strings of a grand piano. Keller plays with a percussive imagination: striking the strings and keys with hammers, rubbing them with metal tubes, and more. The result is a music of “resonance,” where uniquely full reverberations, dully trembling sawtooth-like tones, percussive blows that transform the piano into a drum, and even unusual sounds created by pressing the tip of a recorder against a plate laid on the keys, scatter through space in a whirlwind of inventive sonic ideas.
A1: Ex Tempore VI Und Anrufung
B1: Sduvebringen/Breduingen