SCHNEIDER & STEFAN GOLDMANN, TOM - Strictures, Livres I & II

"The works on this cassette are based on a historic recording of "Structures I" by Pierre Boulez. Tom Schneider cut it into shreds -- samples which he then mapped onto a MIDI keyboard, ready to be played freely while pulverizing any overarching structure. In addition to improvisational reshuffles, acts of sock-puppetry join the resulting collection: The thinking behind other seminal works for piano such as John Cage's "4'33" and Helmut Lachenmann's "Guero" are linked to the audio or parametric content of "Structures". "0.433" takes the original recording's pauses and sequences them into a bumpy stretch of silence. For "Boulero", temporal and tonal properties of one of the underlying works drive the shape of the other. Further pathways open up through MIDI data-extraction, generating new layers, organized into musical units which then can be played on a keyboard: Authentically serialist extensions of the limited parameters available to the pen and paper of the original composer. Stefan