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viewing 1 To 5 of 5 items
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FOB 067LP
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Issued by Leo Fegin's visionary record label in 1993, Leo Records, this refreshed and revised reissue collection of Hungarian composer Tibor Szemző's chamber pieces with spoken text -- composed in the 1980s for the legendary GROUP 180 -- is unlike anything else of its kind. No one has survived life. Everyone has died from it so far. Man must realize that He is responsible for His own life and fate and must insist upon this responsibility beyond all limits. And since man has dissociated himself from the sphere of irrationality, He has no way of getting in touch with death, or of establishing control over it. How we achieve the final result is merely of secondary importance. If the vision is clear to everyone, there is no need at all to look back. In a time of complete mental disturbance, only one chance remains to us: crystal-clear thinking. This leads you back to total mental disturbance, which everyone has died from so far. (Pavel Havliček -- Miklós Erdély -- Tibor Hajas)
Text and Music - Language and Speech - Sound and Music: The common basis of the three works by Tibor Szemző heard on this album is the inalienable relationship to text -- as an a priori principle. Text and music: the formal attributes of significance, intentions, and levels of meaning inherent in verbal communication as it is transformed into audible code. Language and speech: the structural level of communication, where it becomes purposeful expression, acoustic statements of variable modality. Vocalization as sublimation. Sound and music: By becoming an auditory signal, communication is deprived of its sense and reduced to musical articulation and abstraction. "Skullbase Fracture": Shards of reality -- senseless, disconnected fragments of recorded "living speech" -- simultaneously disintegrate and merge to create meaning through the musical process, while it is degraded and stylized to represent a single layer of the ambient noise one would hear in a hospitality setting. "Optimistic Lecture": The theses -- like a practical, everyday user's manual to cognitive tendencies and aims as they apply to the entirety of existence -- convey their meaning through simplified rhythmic speech, galvanized into commands. As a counterpoint to recited prayers, they comprise a uniform soundscape. "The Sex Appeal of Death": The head-on simplicity of communication creates such extremely reductive musical interrelations that they cannibalize themselves in a necessary and inevitable fashion. And, in this manner, the text as well.
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FOB 066LP
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Tibor Szemző presents two compositions on his new album Snap #2: The Other Shore & Cuba. As the title implies, Snap #2 can be considered a sequel to his cult album Snapshot from the Island. In that first album the island was a metaphor for isolation and now Snap #2 offers Szemző's reflections of his visits to real islands, Cuba in 1988-1990 and Japan in 1992-1994. As usual, Tibor Szemző processed the themes both visually and musically and has presented them many times live as cinematographic performances. The previous version of "The Other Shore" was released in 1999 on CD. On this album the original recording from 1997 is used; it has been recomposed, remixed, and remastered and some additional recordings have been included. The core of Szemző's Gordian Knot ensemble of the mid-nineties -- Tibor Szemző (bass flute), Péter Magyar (drums), Tamás Tóth (bass guitar) -- has been enlarged by a string section and additional percussionists. "The Other Shore" composition has a multilayered texture; it starts with strings and is followed by prerecorded voices reciting the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Wonderful Law (Myôhô-Renge-Kyô in Japanese), the most important sutra of Mahayana Buddhism. Then, percussion introduces the basic beat of the piece and the voice of the 102 year-old Buddhist priest Ônishi Ryôkei giving a lecture on Kannon sutra is heard. The following uneven entries of drums and bass guitar are like paint brush strokes in Zen calligraphy. The long tones of Szemző's bass flute enters the piece as the last element suggesting itself as a connecting thread through all previous layers. When Tibor Szemző first visited Cuba in 1988 he had just started shooting film on 8mm, something of a personal diary. When he met Jonas Mekas in Budapest a few years later, he realized that this footage could be screened publicly and also be an integral part of live performances. "Cuba", presented on the Snap #2 album, is the recording from 2000 of one such performance and was remixed by the author in 2021. The Gordian Knot band seemingly structures the piece in the same way as "The Other Shore", but the resulting sound is much heavier especially thanks to drummer Péter Magyar. Nevertheless, the contributions of Szemző on bass flute, Mihály Huszár on electric bass, and T. Bali on prepared electric guitar also inject the proper rock sting. Incorporated Havanna street sounds and local radio broadcasts recorded by the author provide even more steamy roughness to the sound of Szemző's "Cuba". 45RPM.
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FOB 065LP
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Tibor Szemző is not only a skillful and experienced Hungarian musician but also a media artist with a vast imagination. His last LP, Arbo X - Csoma Grooves, refers to his full-length film A Guest of Life released in 2006, for which he not only directed but also composed all the music. The film is inspired by the life of Alexander Csoma de Körös, a remarkable polyglot from the 19th century who set out from his native Transylvania to central Asia on foot to look for the roots of the Hungarian language. He reached Tibet, dedicated the rest of his life to study of Tibetan manuscripts and finally became the founder of Tibetology. After 14 years, Tibor Szemző decided to explore the theme further and composed the cinematic performance, Silverbird and the Cyclist, where he as narrator presented the story of Csoma from a different perspective. Arbo X is the music from this performance and it is based on the soundtrack of the original movie but the material has been restructured and enhanced by new layers. There are fourteen relatively short tracks on the album and each of them has a very specific character, sometimes mysterious as the titles of the tracks themselves. Their arrangement is ingeniously composed. Szemző's typical bass flute and voice with percussion accompaniment on the first track "Axis" is a very impressive introduction to the whole album. The following tracks build up a series of colorful sound parables, which are in no way descriptive. Every element, whether it's a double bass, viola, soprano voice, vocal trio, or electronics, fits perfectly within the overall sound fabric with effective timing. Listening to Arbo X one unwittingly concentrates on interweaving details without losing the sense of the whole. It's certainly a great benefit, as in previous recordings, that most of the musicians participating in the recording of Arbo X are very familiar with Szemző's music and his collaboration with some of them goes back to Group 180, a new music ensemble he founded in 1978 and soon earned international acclaim. This most recent album belongs among a long line of recordings that Tibor Szemző has released during his musical career and displays great compositional complexity and a keen sense of a perfectly balanced sound spectrum. Mastered by Istvan Szelenyi. Edition of 300.
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FOB 064LP
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Hungarian "minimalist" instrumentalist/composer Tibor Szemző is considered a genius by many, although his accomplishments as an artist are sometimes overshadowed by the likes of superstars, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Snapshot From The Island was originally released by Leo Records in 1987 and now 33 years later the album gets the proper reissue on his own label. Snapshot From The Island is a wonderful excursion into ambient-electronic-acoustic dreamscapes which could also be considered an offshoot of what many call the "minimalist movement". The title track, "Snapshot From The Island" is a 24-minute tone poem featuring Szemző performing on computer drums and flutes of various pitch. Here, Szemző provides a soft rhythmic undercurrent to balance the somewhat ethereal and delightfully hypnotic motif as he also electronically emulates bird and animal sounds which magnifies the mood or imagery of a faraway "Island" paradise. Szemző is a true artist, a painter with a fertile imagination, as he invites the listener into his introspective world of thoughts and dreams. Szemző's lush, yet subtle flute work evokes a surreal landscape on "Water-Wonder". On this piece, Szemző pursues circular passages while also intelligently utilizing a dash of echo to enhance the aura of a magical or mystical place, which for all intents and purposes seems timeless or otherworldly. "Let's Go Out And Dance" is a dream-laden piece, featuring Szemző's "cosmic" flute performances atop a soft pulse and László Hortobágyi's synthesizer backwashes which conveys a sense of fulfillment or perhaps a scenario of -- peaceful celebration. Again, Szemző offers up more visions of paradise, which could very well have been a subtitle to this beautiful recording. The overall organic nature of Tibor Szemző's music makes it all seem so real or something that our imaginations can easily grasp. There are no hidden clues or underlying mysteries behind all of this as Szemző's artistry speaks for itself. A museum piece for the ears. Remastered by István Szelényi, 2020.
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FOB 063LP
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Tibor Szemző returns with a new album, based on the music for his film about historic figure Alexander Csoma. Tibor Szemző is a Hungarian composer, performer, media artist. Recently his album Snapshots From The Island (1987) gained renewed interest. Over the years, Tibor Szemzo continued composing classical/electronic works. His pieces often include spoken texts, film, and other media. He creates installations and composes music for his own and others' films. Csoma, his new album, is based on the music for this film about Alexander Csoma. Alexander set up to research the origin of the Hungarians 200 years ago. During his student years, before he enrolled in college, he and two fellow students vowed to go to Central Asia to discover the origins of their nation. In the first thirty-five years of his life, he spent his humble pilgrimage in Asia traveling and studying with Buddhist priests in Tibet in isolation, and devoted the remaining eleven years of his life to publishing some of the material he had collected in India. Now on the 200th anniversary, Szemző's cinematic opera wishes to pay tribute to Alexandar Csoma. Over the course of two vinyl sides classical and acoustic instruments are mixed with angelic voices, spoken word in German, Hungarian, and English. Sounding like vintage Tibor Szemzo compositions, vividly performed by the Gordian Knot Company and the Voces Aequales Ensemble.
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