Previewing one of Cleopatra Records’ most ambitious (and extravagant) releases of the year, today sees the release of Chopin’s “Berceuse Op. 57,” taken from Mariusz Szypura’s acclaimed Chopin Residue Blu-Ray, as reworked by remixer extraordinaire Fennesz.
It is just one of a series of reimaginings and reinventions include on the full album, featuring some of the most impactful remixers of the age – Fennesz is joined by Milosz Pękala, John McEntire, Blanket Swimming, Jacek Gawlowski and more, with each of the performances present as both a “Deconstruction” or a “Rework.”
Speaking about the remixes, Polish-born artist Szypura explains, “I briefed [the artists] on the concept, sent the deconstructions and let them do what they do. Matthew Herbert built a house/dub out of it, Christine Ott went straight to ondes Martenot [if you’ve never heard this eerie sounding electronic instrument, you will now!], Fennesz did what Fennesz does.”
SINGLE: https://orcd.co/vpbm1k2
Releasing on Blu-ray on August 21, with other formats set to follow later this year, Chopin Residue is packaged as imaginatively as the music! The CD will feature a six-panel digipak with a cutout circle on the cover and nine individual inserts (one for each composition) so the user can change the cover image by simply inserting one of the 9 inserts in the front panel of the digipak. The vinyl is a double LP in a trifold jacket. It has the same 9 inserts just scaled up to 12”x12” vinyl size.
Chopin Residue has already been compared to John Cage’s 4.’33, but that’s only the beginning, as Szypura continues.
“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.”
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!
CD/VINYL: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=chopin+residue&options
DIGITAL: https://orcd.co/prjp8v9
BLU-RAY: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=chopin+residue
Track List:
- Prelude Op. 28 No. 22
- Étude Op. 25 No. 12
- Berceuse Op. 57
- Prelude Op. 28 No. 20
- Prelude Op. 28 No. 4
- Prelude Op. 28 No. 2
- Nocturne Op. 72 No. 1
- Prelude Op. 28 No. 9
- Prelude Op. 28 No. 15
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