Conceived of just before Nils broke his thumb and composed the similarly intimate solo piano album Screws, Empty is a soothing vessel of eight simple and serene pieces originally recorded as the music to a short art film he shot with his friend and film director Benoit Toulemonde. Drifting through emotions from the stark and sobering opener First Defeat, to the gently euphoric No Step On Wing and the contemplative but hopeful closer Black Notes, with its poignant minute of silence, Empty is a comforting score for these turbulent times.

“When I came back from the hospital with a broken thumb and listened to the recordings, I felt they were unfinished. I decided to put them aside and started to work on my small album, Screws.
Many many other notes of the piano have been struck since these days, and before we all forget about this, I thought it would be a good moment to share these lullabies with you. I hope they help you stay all strong and calm in these days of solitude – despite the hardship, we can discover introspection and reflection unexpectedly. Who knows what it is good for.
Much love !”
– Nils

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Meant as a sister release to last year’s acclaimed six-part modular synth suite Teenages, Beta is a series of experiments chronicling Naqvi’s understanding of writing for this type of instrument and the growth of the instrument itself.

The B-side of Beta is a live performance of the track Teenages, which was recorded at the first Erased Tapes x LCO: Purcell Session at Southbank Centre, London in February 2019.

If Teenages captured the sound of electronics living, breathing and mutating of their own accord, Beta rather describes the moment they came to life.

“Beta is a prequel to the story of Teenages. At the time I had the most basic elements of a modular synthesiser – one oscillator and a random voltage generator which is a module that releases sporadic currents through the system. Ironically, this component provided a lot of warmth and humanness to the music, a kind of fallibility. I fed simple melodic ideas and rhythmic patterns into this bare bones setup and observed the responses, while occasionally guiding the music in other directions. It was like a diagnostic test. At the time I felt that this music was underdeveloped but listening back, I think the Beta tracks add an interesting dimension to the entire Teenages arc. They’re the zygotes.” — Qasim Naqvi

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Though the score has an important part to play in heightening the atmosphere of the game, it has the capability of being a standalone album – carefully sequenced down to a 10-track selection by label founder Robert Raths. There is a considerably therapeutic quality about it, allowing the audience to transcend into a meditative state, which is what makes it a perfect partner for Everything. The music is a whole world of its own, yet part of the game’s universe.

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Ukrainian pianist Lubomyr Melnyk has often felt that his unique Continuous Music playing is akin to water – flowing and ever connected. As he further developed his technique, and the more the notes flowed, the closer to water he felt. “I found my hands and arms and everything inside them changing from normal muscle and flesh to well… water.”

With his latest album Rivers and Streams, Lubomyr focuses deeply on this connection to water, to the point where the music itself begins to embody its liquid form. Produced by Robert Raths and Jamie Perera, the album flows seamlessly from the live recordings of The Pool of Memories, captured in a church, to pieces entirely born in the studio, such as Sunshimmers and Ripples in a Water Scene, which feature Perera on acoustic and electric guitar.

Amorphous, ever-changing, Lubomyr as performer becomes subsumed into the natural ebb and flow of the keys as the album drifts between nascent upstream trickles and deeply reflective passages through winding river valleys. The album reaches its climax in The Amazon, a 20-minute piece dedicated to the world’s largest river. Raths invited Korean flautist Hyelim Kim to guest on the first part, before Lubomyr closes the album with cascades of arpeggio figures, stretching across the breadth of the keyboard with rapid virtuosity.

“In the body of the Continuous Piano Master, the fingers and the hands turn into Water, Air and Stone. These are the three manifestations of the Continuous Technique. And for the Continuous Pianist, the fingers physically transform the music into one of these three elements.
The greatest of all miracles in the universe is Water. It is also, I believe, the rarest of all physical things in the universe. Water is the most magical and the most mysterious of all things we know! And so I dedicate this album to the Rivers and Streams of this world – in gratitude for their Beauty!“
– Lubomyr Melnyk

The cover artwork shows the surface of vines captured with macro photography by French artist Marion Benoit, which Lubomyr discovered in early 2015 as the perfect visual counterpart.

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Armed with nothing but their voices, a violin and an upright bass, Allred & Broderick began their journey to create an album as minimal as possible. Recorded in Peter’s studio The Sparkle on the Oregon coast, the pair used this solitude to focus on creating something as raw and honest as possible, particularly in what some might deem unattainable during a time where complexity is sought most.

In a world full of noise and the anxieties of every day life, Find The Ways brings us together and reminds us to appreciate and confront the simple and fundamental facts of life, and that we as individuals will eventually find our way.

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While O’Halloran and Wiltzie first started recording their score with sound collaborator Francesco Donadelloin in Berlin, they eventually took their work to Magyar Radio in Budapest, where it gain the help of a 40-piece string orchestra.

In a joint statement, here’s what A Winged Victory for the Sullen had to say about their resulting score:

Despite A Winged Victory for the Sullen being associated with film score type music, trying to survive the process of creating the modern film score is not for people with fragile egos. It requires those who are the most responsive to change. The director and the film presented a new set of challenges, so we decided to stop thinking about cinema as an object, and moved closer to using the film’s images as triggers for experiences. The more we were able to let go, and see the music as something that happens, like a process – not a quality, the more we were able to reach a place that sounded like us. It was as if we were making our first record all over again, except being filtered through another language littered with dead metaphors.

As for the film itself, Iris was directed by Jalil Lespert and stars Romain Duris and Charlotte Le Bon. According to a synopsis, “The story revolves around the kidnapping of the wife of a wealthy banker in the middle of Paris. The main suspect is a down and out mechanic, but there is a deeper, darker and mysterious plot underway that goes beyond the initial assumptions from the police.“

Brock Thiessen | Exclaim.ca

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It opens with simple piano piece Goodnight, baked by a tranquil, wordless vocal. The following track, Low Light is another piano piece with an even finer melody and arrangement. Violin Solo No. 1 is just that, a fine violin piece, worthy of any contemporary soloist. It’s A Shame When I Sleep might be the one slightly off note, it’s a seven minute piece of clattering piano, and, while impressive, jars a little with the more fragile, emotional material here, coming across more like an exercise in piano pyrotechnics. Serenity returns with final track Eyes Closed and Travelling, a graceful piano piece which closes off the EP nicely.

Killian Lahe | nomoreworkhorse.com

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For close to a decade, Portland’s Peter Broderick has cut his own unpredictable path through the world of contemporary music. So far, his wanderings have led him from solo works into the realms of film, dance and documentary scores, as well as art installations. Now Peter takes that unpredictability one step further.

For his latest album, a series of voice and piano recordings, he experiments with chance, surrendering an entire song’s composition to the roll of dice. As he explains below in an email to Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths, it was John Cage’s tendency to remove himself from his music, to somehow automate his own process, which inspired the strange mechanics with which this record was created.
In the words of Cage himself, ‘the world is teeming; anything can happen.’

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