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In a year that has already seen some remarkable modern classical releases, Cleopatra Records is proud to present perhaps the most astonishing of them all.  Chopin Without Chopin.

Releasing on August 21 on a stunning Blu-ray video (with visualizers) and digital, mixed in both stereo and Dolby Atmos (vinyl and CD versions will follow later this year), Chopin Residue has already been compared to John Cage’s 4’33″, but that’s only the beginning, as Polish-born musician and artist Mariusz Szypura explains.

“Chopin is inescapable in Poland. You grow up with him the way other people grow up with weather. At some point that stops being inspiring and starts being noise, you don’t hear the music anymore, you hear the monument.

“So I took the piano out. Not as a provocation, more as a question: if you remove the instrument everyone identifies with this music, what’s actually left? Turns out quite a lot. The harmonic structure is still there, the phrasing, the strange melancholy in the intervals. That’s the residue. The piano was the delivery system, not the content.

“Practically,  it meant giving the material to guitars, drums, theremin, ondes Martenot, electronics, breath. Nine compositions on Deconstructions, then nine reworks by other artists on the second disc. You can also play both discs at the same time, they were built to overlap.

“For the immersive version this was the real payoff. In stereo you hear an arrangement. In Atmos you’re inside the harmonic space with the piano missing from the middle of it. The absence becomes physical. That’s not a format upgrade, it’s closer to what the piece was always trying to do.

“I couldn’t have done that version alone. Morten Lindberg, Jacek Gawlowski and I are credited jointly as immersive audio producers, and Morten in particular thinks about space in a way that changed how I heard my own material. He treats the room as part of the composition, which is exactly what this record needed. Michael Romanowski did the immersive mastering and kept the whole thing from turning into a spectacle, which was the real risk. Working with people at that level made me rethink what the project actually was.”

In fact, there were more than 25 guests across the performance. 

 “I gave everyone a lot of room. I sent material, said what the piece was missing, and mostly got back things I couldn’t have asked for. It’s a completely instrumental record, so everything anyone contributed had to work as sound, not as a message.

 “Adrian Utley brought that Portishead sense of dread that sits under a chord without explaining itself, and then did his own rework of Op. 25 No. 12. Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) plays guitar in a way you’d never expect from the material. John Stanier (Battles) hits drums with an authority that stops the music from floating away.

 “Joey Waronker (Atoms for Peace, Beck) and Justin Meldal-Johnsen came in as a rhythm section on the Etude and they gave it a forward motion the original doesn’t have, Chopin written as a groove rather than a phrase. John McEntire (Tortoise) approaches drums like an editor, combining patterns that sit somewhere between jazz and something mechanical. Zoh Amba is the opposite instinct, her saxophone is raw and doesn’t negotiate, and putting that against Chopin’s harmony was one of the things that told me the concept worked.”

Other guests include ambient masters Blanket Swimming, former David Bowie bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and David Pajo (Slint).

 Mariusz continues, “The reworks disc is a different logic: Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke, Matthew Herbert, Christine Ott, Abul Mogard, Sean O’Hagan, Masayoshi Fujita, Benoít Pioulard. I briefed them on the concept, sent the deconstructions and let them do what they do. Herbert built a house/dub out of it, Ott went straight to Ondes Martenot [if you’ve never heard this eerie sounding electronic instrument, you will now!], Fennesz did what Fennesz does to a signal.”

 And the whole thing, he concludes, “works because nobody was trying to replace Chopin. They were all working in the gap where the piano used to be.”

 Turns out that it was a very big gap!

DIGITAL: https://orcd.co/mariuszszypura_chopinresidue
BLU-RAY: https://cleorecs.com/products/mariusz-szypura-chopin-residue-blu-ray

Track List:

1. Prelude Op. 28 No. 22 feat. Matthew Herbert, Lee Ranaldo, Zoh Amba
2. Étude Op. 25 No. 12 feat. Adrian Utley, Joey Waronker, Lee Ranaldo, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Charlie Draper, Miłosz Pękala
3. Berceuse Op. 57 feat. Fennesz, John McEntire, Blanket Swimming, Miłosz Pękala, Jacek Gawłowski
4. Prelude Op. 28 No. 20 feat. Masayoshi Fujita, Charlie Draper
5. Prelude Op. 28 No. 4 feat. Sean O’Hagan, Joey Waronker, Adrian Utley, Carolina Eyck
6. Prelude Op. 28 No. 2 feat. Jim O’Rourke, John Stanier, Sugar Yoshinaga, Charlie Draper
7. Nocturne Op. 72 No. 1 feat. Christine Ott, John McEntire, Adrian Utley, Gail Ann Dorsey, Nailah Hunter, Peter Pichler, Miłosz Pękala
8. Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 feat. Benoît Pioulard, David Pajo, Zoh Amba, Nailah Hunter, Miłosz Pękala
9. Prelude Op. 28 No. 15 feat. Abul Mogard, Lee Ranaldo, John Stanier, Miłosz Pękala