With Live Circles Orphax returns to Moving Furniture Records with his new album.
Earlier he recorded a work Circles which he released as EP, though now a more developed version comes out as Live Circles.
Live Circles has one long track on the album, which is a mix of Orphax his two performances at Iklectik in London and Centrala in Birmingham from March, 2019.
Live Circles is released on limited CD in an edition of 104, with a total of 15 in a special edition with a bonus remix EP and digital.
You can order the CD through our webshop.
Or find the album on your preferred streaming service: https://orcd.co/orphax-live-circles
About the album
Circles is a work, or composition, that I have been performing live for a few years now in various instances. I consider this work as a growing composition which with every performance grows in a new direction. There is no beginning and no end, and as such it can continue changing over the years.
This connects with Time as an important factor in my work. I consider time to be fluid. While we might know time as a rigid form with days and seasons, this is only a convenience for daily use. This doesn’t explain how people experience time, which is different for everyone.
With Circles, I create a sound environment in which the listener loses the sense of time and space. During performances the audience is often not aware how long I have been performing, and explain that they have been away for a while lost in their thoughts; or as I would call this myself, they “entered the zone”.
I started working on this composition after attending a live performance of music by La Monte Young which inspired me so much, and where I had this same experience of losing sense of time and space. Not that the work sounds anything like La Monte Young’s work, but it did help me refocus again on my own work. Aside from this there is, as in most of my work, a big influence by Eliane Radigue whose work I still consider to be at the top of drone and minimalist work. She remains an inspirational musician and composer.
The version of Circles you hear in this album is recorded with the ARP Odyssey, MFOS WSG/01 synthesizer and the AudioMulch Circles patch. Both performances were with the same setup, though imbued with totally different emotions.
In London I was very relaxed, while in Birmingham things were rougher. This contrast probably has to do with the different settings as I arrived the venue at those days. In London there was a positive vibe with a lot of protesters against Brexit walking around with signs and leaflets. There was a strong vibration throughout the city, and you could feel it throughout the whole day.
However, while in Birmingham on my way to the venue I ended up in the middle of a street fight. Imagine my emotions at walking around with my equipment and suddenly, all these young kids starting to throw stones and sticks at each other right where I am heading…
In the mix I combined these two different settings so as to capture throughout the whole album both of these emotions. Though, still even with the roughness, the result is a captivating one which draws the listener in and recreates the same zone as people experienced during the live performances.
Find yourself a comfortable place and have a nice trip.
Sietse
Orphax
Reviews
Vital Weekly
http://www.vitalweekly.net/1194.html
This you may find surprising; I must have seen at least 10 to 15 concerts by Orphax over the years and I know Sietse van Erve as someone who prepares his music very well before playing a concert, but I assumed that he always did a different thing in concert. So to my surprise, I read this on the press text: “Circles is a work, or composition, that I have been performing live for a few years now in various instances. I consider this work as a growing composition, which with every performance grows in a new direction. There is no beginning and no end, and as such it can continue changing over the years.” I didn’t know that.
This CD is not a straightforward concert recording but a mix of two concerts he did in the UK in March of this year. Here we have two concerts, two different circumstances and two different moods for Van Erve. One night was rougher than the other; that happens on the road and these circumstances are beyond the control of the players. It is not something that one hears when listening to this thirty-five-minute piece. You can’t tell which section was recorded where, but I can imagine a few bits in here that are very quiet and some that are a bit louder and thus it is easy to see where what was recorded. In this piece Orphax travels along many different roads, fading, so I assume, between various sections of his piece and perhaps between various sections of recordings. Sometimes it seems these fades were rather rapid in terms of drone music, but I might be wrong and it is intentional. I also assume these recordings are a mix of line and microphone recordings, as they have great depth, like the music resonating through the space it is played in.
I gave up thinking about what is the best Orphax ever; Van Erve produced many great ones already and this I could easily rank among his best works also.
(FdW)
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Art Into Life
http://www.art-into-life.com/product/10462
[Saxophone Studies]や[Piano Music]等、明らかに作品の質が研ぎ澄まされたハードコアなものへと変貌している音作家Orphax。待望の2019年の新作アルバムは、ラモンテヤングのライブ・パフォーマンスに参加した後取り組み始めたという純粋な持続音長編。ARP Odysseyを軸としたシステムは氏が最も影響を受けたラディーグを思わせますが、抑揚のあるハッキリとした起伏の感情的展開はこの人物ならではのもの。今までのリリース群の中でも最高に素晴らしい一枚。
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