Eberhard Weber Colours - Little movements

Music is somehow more than other arts. I think it's the most undescribable kind of art, that's what we talked about with my friend approximately a week ago. When you hear one of your favourite music, you don't just say "it's really, really cool", but you feel something, something of fullness, which effect is "the world cannot be so dark as I see it in other moments". Somehow everything gets to its right place. And it's a fantastic power of this art.

Eberhard Weber's Little movement album did the same with me this morning. As the sun shined into the room at the middle of the day, in the silent deepness of the moveless winter, the room has been filled with something... some kind of new atmosphere. The most exciting thing on this album is the piano-flute melody in the first piece, The last stage of a long journey. It has an extremely strange nostalgic and expressive effect, which I hear and say "that's something for which it's worth to live". And it's a serious sentence, I think. After it, Bali has a repetitive mood, again with beautiful melodies.

Little movements is unfortunately out of press, so it's a rarity and hard to get. eBay can help you, if you want an original one, but the rarity has its price as well. And, as ice on the cake, it has a very nice cover, designed by Maja Weber.

Eberhard Weber made many albums for ECM, many with his keyboardist cooperate Rainer Brüninghaus (read about one of his albums, Continuum). They can make very expressive and qualitative things together.

Let's find something more amongst old lps.

Read about another ECM album, Meredith Monk - Dolmen music, and a commendation about few ECM albums.

Visit http://www.ecmrecords.com/

The ECM Season

I should have written this post at least a month ago, but I don't have too much time nowadays. It will change soon.

So the ECM Season... what's this? Just that sort of things which lives in my mind, and I think about it as "something which is coming", "something which is worth to wait". As the weather turns cold and dark, the nights lengthen, people get in a mood when they would like to hear music which is more serious, I mean it stands on a higher and more complex musical quality, or has a contemplative side. Autumn comes and soon passes by to give its way to the long, long and dark winter. Sometimes we feel it wouldn't like to be over, it wants to stay here forever. But autumn, the beautiful season has another kind of special moods, which I told you a few times earlier in this blog. This special feeling takes great effect on you but as autumn goes ahead, the weather gets colder and the colours less colourful, the contemplative side and passing-by mood appears immediately. It's something which we have felt in our minds for a very long time, and maybe got stronger by poems, films, and childhood memories.

So this time has a special kind of music, too. The German label ECM can perfectly fit these desires with its special styled covers and great, fantastic, sometimes strange music. Let me show you a few notable albums.

• John Abercrombie & Ralph Towner - Sargasso Sea
• Art ensemble of Chicago - Full force
• Chick Corea - Return to forever
• Eberhard Weber Colours - Little movements
• Oregon - Oregon
• Colin Walcott, Don Cherry, Nana Vasconcelos - CoDoNa
• Rainer Brüninghaus - Freigeweht
• Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen - Those who were
  

Later you will see reviews of these albums here.
Visit the record's website: http://www.ecmrecords.com/, where you can download their new catalogue, too.

Rainer Brüninghaus - Continuum

It's a real rarity. It's hard to get it. An album by ECM Records, which unfortunately stopped manufacturing it more than 10 years ago. So this is a reportage from the past, also because its really special atmosphere.

Rainer Brüninghaus is a German pianist/keyboardist whose name could be familiar by some ECM albums, for example his other album, Freigeweht, or Eberhard Weber - Silent feet / Little movements / Yellow fields or Jan Garbarek - Visible word / I took up the runes, etc.

Then, in the September of 1983 with trumpeter Markus Stockhausen they created something which became an unknown value of art. His piano melodies and Stockhausen's trumpet voice suit to each other well, and make an airy distant sound. The album was recorded by the trio, but often it's only Rainer and Markus, and Rainer don't play just on piano, he uses other synthetizers, for example pads, too. A real unique piece, and just because of this, it's hard to describe it... you know, there are a few albums which we know and can't describe, because its oddities. Maybe you have to look at the cover: the distant city lights, vivid movements in the night, flowing into rays, meandering ahead in time and space, to reach the unknown future, with its uncertainity and doubtfulness. As I was listening to this album last night in the silence of my room, I imagined a view like the cover which can be seen from my window, from a high skyscraper at night. There's a huge silence around me, I can't hear the distant, low noise from outside, but I can see the slowly moving lights. As I look down in fiction and listen to the music, I also get touched by the past, and the future. The past by its real passed-by fact and faintly depressing nostalgia, and the future by those mentioned things before. One of my dreams is a view like that image. So I don't wait for longer, I send you the second track on the album, Stille, which means silence. In the first half, listening to the contemplative and strange piano sounds, the cover is getting more and more alive in my mind. Later, as the whole trio forms, they can pick us out from time and space, and take us to... the continuum.

Stille:

Meredith Monk - Dolmen music

I often think about the summer, and yesterday an early-summer afternoon came to my mind - in that afternoon I was preparing to my math comprehensive exam and in the background I was listening to this album. That evening there was a huge storm, so these memories are connected now. You can see the dark clouds on the picture.

Meredith Monk is a singer who has developed her own, very strange and special singing style and technics. Her music can be minimal, energetic, beautiful, sad, pleasant, and sometimes irritating - in the same time. Probably it will take some time for accepting it by the listener - or it won't even happen. But I always think that every music needs a mood (or weather) for listening and every mood (or weather) can find a music which suits it.

Dolmen music comes from an other, imaginary world. The picture above represents it very well: people sitting around a table - we don't know who are they, why are they there and what are they doing. Listen to the choir in the beginning of the last track: it gets louder and more detailed at every new part, making an atmosphere where we can see more and more from an unknown place - the melody is serious and strict (I think there was a long preparation period before the recording - and there's a microphone on that table but I don't know that they did it in the reality or it's just a design element - I hope the first).

Near the end there's a cool, enchanting melody by a chello, using it in an unconventional way. In the video (from 3:00) you can see as they are beating the strings by the bow and drum sticks.

It's recorded in 1980 and 81, and released by ECM records.

http://www.last.fm/music/Meredith+Monk/+videos/+1-CyA19sVeRPw