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LP
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HOL 094LP
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Holiday Records presents Orpheus by Hartmut Geerken. Fantastic sound poetry piece by Hartmut Geerken restringing the "Sun Harp", the Ukranian bandura that Sun Ra gave him in 1971 when he visited Egypt for the first time. The acoustics of his manual workings emerge without any esthetic intention: the bandura's voluminous resonating body forms the reverb of the room. Each manual action and each contact of the tuning key with the wooden body is "reverbed". The instrument creates its audio space. A mythic dream play is evoked: the myth's space of reverb. An ear ready to absorb, hears the labor pains of voice and string ahead of language and music. A human voice in search for language and thus for communication. A string instrument in search for sound and thus for music. Based on this phonemic pre-space, words do rise only sporadically. Through certain techniques of vocal chords the phonemes move close to the meditative Indian Dhrupad-singing, as well as to lunacy and disturbance. Animal languages, signals, shepherds' calls, silvered drum-language, ham-boning, calls, litany, subconscious voicings, sirens: the search for Eurydike and the search for the origin of letter and syllable, out of the breath. Besides one single "superimposition" no further mounting, no computer-generated sounds, no digital gimmicks, no remix or art mix do exist in this live-recorded dream play. Edition of 200.
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LP
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HOL 053LP
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"Hartmut Geerken is a writer, a composer, a musician, a film-maker, an actor, and also a lumberjack. He traveled the world and lived in Egypt where he founded -- together with Salah Ragab and Edu Vizvari -- the Cairo Jazz Band and the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble. He also played with Embryo, in a trio with John Tchicai and Don Moye (with whom he made an extensive tour in Africa), and also with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He worked with Sunny Murray, Don Cherry, Okay Termiz, Peter Kowald, Takehisa Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta, and so many more. This longplayer captures two very different moments of his work. On side A -- recorded in 1994 -- he wildly plays the legendary Sun Harp, which Sun Ra gave him in Egypt in 1971 as a guarantee for the money Hartmut lent him to fly back to the States. Sun Ra promised that 'he would buy it back from him one day' but this never happened and he's still the owner of this magical instrument. The last track of this side is joined by eight basses building an enchanting chorus. On the flip, a highly meditative song split into three chapters recorded in a cave on the island of Gavdos in Greece in 2007, playing a flexible roll piano."
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