artistS

angus MACRAE

Angus MacRae is a London based composer and musician.

He has collaborated with a diverse range of filmakers, choreographers, theatre directors, animators and photographers from across Europe and beyond. Angus's music has also been heard on commercials for brands including Sony, Toyota and Homebase and have been aired in the UK and internationally.

As an accomplished pianist and performer, his solo releases include "Awake" & "Tides" (2015) as well as "Cry wolf" (2017). Those materials are intimate works for the piano, which blend melancholic melodies with minimalist structures and rich, atmospheric electronics.

KASPER STAUB

Kasper Staub is a danish pianist, arranger and composer.

He is known for playing in the indie band "Lowly" (Bella Union), but is very active with his jazz trio as well, with which he has already released two albums in 2012 and 2014 (Havenepladen).

He has also teamed up with many other artists, including the band "I think you are awesome" and "Islets of Dust" (People and Dust, 2012) and arranged choirs and string orchestras.

Garreth Brooke

Garreth Brooke is a graduate pedagogue and a composer based in Frankfurt, Germany.

Although his years of musical training were fairly classical, from beginning to learn the piano at 6, until obtaining his university degrees (which included work on representations of sexuality in the operas of Benjamin Britten), his life path is more atypical. Indeed, he has to his credit several experiences in the charitable world in particular as a volunteer on organic farms, a student in environmental conservation and a worker for a youth hostel association during 4 years. These gave him more discernment, perspective and depth at an age when one is typically still wondering about one’s own future.

These days his time is divided between musical composition, his work as a teacher and the charity project “Upright”, which publishes contemporary piano sheet music.

ANTONYMES

Formed at some point during 2008 by designer, photographer, conceptualist and musician Ian M Hazeldine, as a group that could contains just himself, and others when it seemed appropriate.

Antonymes music emerges from the adjustments and erasures of ambient, the pace and persistence of minimalism, where music expresses nothing but itself.

It’s worth mentioning that Antonymes is of North Wales to take an approach to the music understanding the location where it was made up and produced, to reach the music as if it is the beginning, or the end, of some kind of map, that will take you up mountains, across streams, to the sea, where the tide comes in, and the tide goes out, under the waves, through the woods and into the obscure wilderness that stretches between one patch of land and another, between one village and the next.

In so doing, it is worth recalling these words of the great poet RS Thomas himself a native of this part of the globe for whom "To live in Wales is to be conscious, at twilight, of the spilt blood that served to make the wild sky, to stain the wild rivers in all their courses."

AWAKE EP

Set against a backdrop of distant voices, spiralling tape delays and rich analog synthesisers,"Awake" is now a vinyl format of 5 tracks that revolves around a collection of intimate piano improvisations, performed by the composer and recorded with the finest collection of vintage equipment at Snap Studios, London.

By weaving together hypnotically fragile melodies with sonorous, haunting textures, the record mixes the familiar with the new to create an album of stark, coherent beauty. It is a journey deep into the waking mind, exploring the territory on the very edge of consciousness

AISLE ARCH ATTIC

"Aisle arch attic", is the very first solo album by Kasper. The record is an elegant pianistic journey in the heart of the modern classical. The central piece is "Fever dream".

The album, mastered in Denmark, by the inescapable "Emil Thomsen", contains nine short pieces for piano, which unfold in a very peculiar musicality.

They have all been produced in a very spontaneous way in the studio and recorded directly on a reel-to-reel recorder, which for the artist had to draw even more attention to the recording process.

HEALING

“Healing” is a suite of 10 movements for solo piano that traces an arc between grief and recovery. It combines 11 abstracts artworks specially designed by visual artist Anna Salzmann with 30 minutes of piano music by Garreth. The music is by turns tender, melancholic, poignant and ultimately redemptive in the joyous final movement.

Garreth explains why : “Healing" explores the complex, not always linear process of healing. Any struggle is full of contradictions: there are moments of pain and relief, tension and release, opacity and clarity [...] we have old wounds, whether they be physical or mental. We’ve found that the act of creation/healing is far more powerful when working together because it forces us to listen more carefully, to act more wisely, to strive to find workable compromise.”1

“To seek to heal is to be human. Everyone suffers grief, loss, and fear. Everyone feels pain. Although this project came from us, it is not about us. The strength of any person comes from their willingness to confront the darkest moments, to accept reality for what it is and to choose to move forward. We live in a world that increasingly shies away from the difficult, in which we focus blindly on the positive and hide in echo chambers speaking only to those who share the same opinion. Our society needs to heal. We hope we’ve created a space where that healing can take place."2

1 - Interview made with the blog “Stationary travels” - Through musical lens : Healing by Anna Salzmann & Garreth Broke, october 11, 2019.

2 - Idem

THE GRAMOPHONE SUITE

Antonymes makes music at the edge of, and deep inside, and from above North Wales. It begins at the piano, where notes, space and intention, and something of the soul, and the mind catching itself combine over time, until a shape appears, which suggest other shapes, and lines, and something else, an anatomy, the lateral spread of a single surface, and a shadow or two.

What happens at the piano, the notes, space and presence, is taken further, into the computer, which is alive, onto the screen, where it gets twisted, gently, and given more detail, until it is fully formed, and it to an extent finished.