Burkhard Beins
Eight Duos
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* Collaboration has always been at the core of Beins’s artistic practice. Reducing the line-up for the project at Morphine Raum to the duo format had pragmatic as well as creative reasons, allowing Beins more flexibility. ‘On a conceptual level, the idea was that I would play with different instruments or with a different set-up each time in order to present the breadth of my current work’, he explains. This notion also informed the selection of his partners, who …
Grain
The meeting of AMM guitarist Keith Rowe with Burkhard Beins on percussion, two studio sessions and one live recording, sparse and subtle improv of the highest standard.
Induction
"Improvised music at this level of concentration may touch the roots of human culture, the transformative power of the cave and the paintings of Lascaux and Altamira." – Stuart Broomer (liner notes) Burkhard Beins percussion John Butcher tenor and soprano saxophones Werner Dafeldecker double bass
An Alphabet Of Fluctuation
"Gerard Lebik and Burkhard Beins create musical forms of minimalist idiom, which consist of isolated sound events as well as gradually revealing harmonies and resonances. Metallic sounds from a large heavy cymbal are amplified and blend with electronically generated sine waves of varying amplitude, unfolding in a continuous glissando. An Alphabet Of Fluctuation is the evidence of how both artists rethink their approach towards deep reduction. One can see here a great sensitivity in determining t…
Fracture Mechanics
In October of 2014 Fracture Mechanics traveled to Ljubljana to play and record. The recording at Radio Student involved the transubstantiation of base liquids into nectar and thence by an alchemical process into music.
Fracture Mechanics, the scientific study of cracks in any form of material, is a well-chosen metaphor for the examination of music, sounds, shapes and their breaking points. The fact that this has given the word "fracture" a slight semantic degrading is of particular importance. E…
Glück
The international quintet Glück combines percussionists of diverse stripes and their individual pronounced ways of playing. The five musicians are internationally renowned as soloists and with various musical outfits. An extremely sound orientated, fragile and transparent approach to their idiosyncratic percussion sets is what they all have in common. From diverse conjoint long-term projects (Vorwolf, Malatesta/Wolfarth, Misiiki) arose the shared wish to put the musical experiences made within t…
Mensch Mensch Mensch
Berlin based composer-performers Liz Allbee and Burkhard Beins team up for some electro-acoustic explorations, utilising synths and field recordings, trumpet and percussion. Informed by their musical backgrounds ranging from industrial / noise via musique concrete to free improv, the two players create interactive fields of an imaginarchic nature. Many lesser oddball talents make the proud boast that they will invite you into their strange mental world and amaze you thereby. Allbee not only make…
Instead of the Sun
Recorded in Sydney by Chris Abrahams and Burkhard Beins from January 5th to 9th, 2015. “I am quite a fan when it comes to the music on Abrahams, as he brings much energy and vibrancy to the table, and that is no different on this new release.It's quite difficult to dissect what is going on here. Should one not know who made this album, a blind test if you will, then one could easily think this is an album made with a modular synthesizer and perhaps very little something else; it is not easy to d…
Future Perfect
Serge Baghdassarians, mixing desk, delays, electric guitar. Boris Baltschun, computer, sampler. Burkhard Beins, percussion, zither. The three gentlemen formed a live performing electroacoustic work unit throughout the first decade of this century, exploring hybrid musical areas shaped by digitized samples, analogue circuits and acoustically produced sounds stemming from a diverse range of materials and objects. This first phase has been documented on the 'Labor' compilation (Charhizma, 2003) and…
Membrane
This marvellous release from Mark Wastell’s Confront label documents a meeting of these three heavy hitters convened at Dalston’s Cafe Oto, last March. This was the first time all three had played together, although, as John Eyles remarks in his liner notes, they had all worked with each other, before, in outfits such as Powelchsel (Butcher and Beins), The Sealed Knot (Beins and Wastell) and Chris Burn’s Ensemble (Wastell and Butcher).
This familiarity, combined with rigour and expertise o…
s/t
ErstLive is a new series of releases from Erstwhile Records, documenting notable live sets associated with the label. The discs are designed to simulate a concert experience, each in the same template design using two colors chosen by the musicians involved, with a photo of the concert on the back cover. Each will be in an edition of 800 CDs and not reprinted. The initial releases will be chosen from the AMPLIFY 2004 festival which took place in Cologne and Berlin in May 2004. ErstLive …