Techno Marching Band supergroup MEUTE and Henrik did collaborate a few times already with great success. Watch and listen here:
MEUTE x Henrik Schwarz – The Coup
Meute x Henrik Schwarz – Come Together
Meute x Henrik Schwarz – Think Twice
Techno Marching Band supergroup MEUTE and Henrik did collaborate a few times already with great success. Watch and listen here:
MEUTE x Henrik Schwarz – The Coup
Meute x Henrik Schwarz – Come Together
Meute x Henrik Schwarz – Think Twice
After the great success of the Amsterdam Dance Event 2016 opening concert at Melkweg in Amsterdam, Metropole Orkest and Henrik Schwarz decided to record an album with the music Henrik has written for the orchestra. The Album was recorded with conductor and arranger Jules Buckley in Hilversum in summer 2017 and was nominated for best Classical Album at Libera Awards 2019.
This collaboration was extended in 2017 and 2018 with several concerts.
Henrik Schwarz composes with love for, and knowledge of orchestral music. Together with chief conductor Jules Buckley he wrote an hour of new music for ‘Scripted Orkestra’. The result is an album full of pieces where the border between dance and orchestral music completely disappears.
Counter Culture is the second track of the album and carries a special message. Henrik Schwarz: “Many bad, weird, absurd, unforeseen things are happening in the world around us. However I didn’t want to complain because I believe negative talking and thinking is the wrong way. So I decided to write an ambitious ‘positive protest song’.”
Counter Culture feat. Ben Westbeech & Metropole Orkest
Algorhythm
On the 24thMay 2019, Henrik Schwarz & Alma Quartet have released CCMYK, a new album on his own label Between Buttons. Produced in collaboration with the Alma String Quartet, it’s a free conversation between classical and electronic musics, carefully transformed into a set of astonishing tracks, ready for club or concert hall.
Schwarz has been exploring this fertile terrain between classical, electronic and dance music for almost a decade. Having produced some of the most elegant dance records of the 2000s, he has spent much of his 2010s collaborating with jazz musicians, orchestras, writing ballets, and recon guring canonical classical works.
The story of CCMYK is the story of chance, communication and control. In 2013, after performing with the Dutch Chamber Orchestra in Amsterdam, Henrik was approached by Marc Daniel of the Alma String Quartet. In 2015, Henrik invited the four players to his studio in Berlin, where they began a series of improvisations. Henrik would suggest a musical phrase, and one of the Alma Quartet would play in response, with another then taking up the idea: highly trained classical musicians recording like a jazz band. Schwarz would record, replay and respond to their classical phrases with his own electronic production. These half hour jams would then be taken home by Henrik. There, he would edit them down, sculpting their form into coherent tracks. During this process he added electronic melodies and beats, even inviting the players back to respond again, thus building and re ning these variations on a theme until the songs were fully formed.
“I love nding the essence of something,” says Schwarz. “I see it like working on a sculpture that someone else began, and to make it visible, you have to cut away until you can see what’s really there. So you nd this balance between free and controlled. We would begin with this totally open vibe, and condense the freeform music into this nished work.”
Though based on free improvisations, CCMYK is not a record of bumbling jams. Rather, it’s a record of startling density, control and emotional complexity. It opens with the ourish of strings: a looped violin, a plucked double bass, interwoven with subtle electronic effects. Throughout the album, piercing melancholy and graceful tension merges with ashes of radiant joy. Dynamic, driving soundscapes like CCMYK3 sound almost ready for the club, while Happy Hipster’s Spring-like verve turns into full, dazzling and almost sorrowful Summer, a tonal shift of which any composer would be proud.
This is the sound of open conversation between piercing intellects, taking their individual instruments and musical backgrounds to create a universe of sound. Perhaps this is the meaning of the album title: three primary colours and a key that combine to bring any image imaginable to life. For the live show, Schwarz has even reimagined the building blocks of both a club and an orchestra. Instead of a conventional loudspeaker, he has remade a cello to amplify his electronic effects. In place of a metronome, the group will look to an automated needle on a display, directed by Schwarz, keeping time with the sensitivity and feeling of a conductor.
“This synthesis of classical and electronic is not only about music. It’s a bigger thing: nding a way to communicate,” says Schwarz. “I’m very interested in combining things that are as far away from each other as possible, and how they can work together. How can you nd the connections that makes sense? The connections that are beautiful and artistic, and lead to a higher combination, not just a linear conversation? I believe this is a major step towards bringing two worlds together.”
The Vinyl version of the album will be available in a limited 4 colour special edition:
ADE Opening Concert: Henrik Schwarz & Metropole Orkest — „Scripted Orkestra“
Opening the Amsterdam Dance Event 2016 celebrations will be a meeting of musical minds: ADE veteran and dance music pioneer Henrik Schwarz and the internationally renowned Metropole Orkest, for „Scripted Orkestra.
Having first met in a Berlin café, Henrik and Jules Buckley (Chief Director, Metropole Orkest) decided to cross the electronic-classical border into new musical grounds. Join us on 19th October at 21:00 CEST as we uncover the magnificent results of their experimentation, live from Amsterdam’s Melkweg.
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