There is also a minimalist quality to the pieces, but the interplay between guitar, delay and strings keeps them from becoming static. It’s been years since Frisell has made such extensive use of the delay, but he’s still an absolute master. Frisell’s delays play a major role in this music (Breskin points out that Richter’s technique of applying a squeegee to wet oil paint is analogous to Frisell “smearing” notes by manipulating his delay), and the way he uses the delayed guitar signal to complement, and in some cases mimic, the strings is quite amazing (remember, this was done live with no editing). The majority of the songs are built on simple repeated figures, and the players all seem free to embellish and improvise on top of that. Since art is, of course, a subjective thing, you may or may not feel that the music directly relates to the paintings, but there’s no denying that this is a fascinating project. The 28-page booklet includes reproductions of the paintings, interviews with Frisell and Breskin, and excerpts from Breskin’s pre-production notes for Frisell, “Outline re: Structure, Aesthetics, Questions, Thoughts.” A Youtube video “slideshow” presents the paintings and their details together with the pieces they inspired, demonstrating analogies between visual art and music that Breskin and Frisell had been working with. Inspired by the whole process, Frisell has since written much more for the band, including a CD on Savoy, Sign of Life: Music for 858 Quartet. But Frisell’s Richter 858 also stands on its own as an evocative suite that straddles jazz and contemporary new music, moving between musical abstraction and something more melodic and “representational,” from extremes of dissonance, energy and noise to darkly serene meditations. There’s a density to the music, a layered quality, and performance strategies that all clearly relate to Richter’s art. Frisell comments: “On most of my recordings I overdub, mix, obsess over it, go back and tweak things, but I wanted this one to somehow represent this gesture of paint going across aluminum or canvas, and you just have to deal with it being there… I was thinking of my role as the guy with the squeegee… If a melody could be the equivalent of a photograph or a recognizable visual image, then what I was doing was kind of smearing the paint around, but there was always some underlying structure that was more carefully worked out.” A few months later Breskin and the band rendezvoused in Seattle and after a couple of days’ rehearsal the music was recorded in a live mix to 1″ analogue in just one day by master engineer Joe Ferla. After viewing the paintings in a private showing and finding out more about Richter, Frisell set about composing. Having discussed the possibility of a project with strings since the ’80s, Breskin and Frisell settled on the basic sound, electric guitar and three acoustic strings, and on the players – gifted, far-ranging improvisers who would relish the aesthetic challenge. In fact this music is a departure for Frisell, although it builds on musical friendships going back years or decades. And yet neither Richter nor Frisell have perfect control of the process, and things happen which they can’t predict.” What Richter does with paint in these abstractions Frisell does with sound: he shapes it, he torques it, he inverts it - he reverses it in time… He uses all these signal-processing devices to take his original sound and transform it… It is very similar to Richter, in the sense that Richter knows well the effects he can get from running the squeegee over a wet section of paint, just like Bill knows the effects he can achieve by feeding a certain series of notes into his delay, and then letting them come back and playing over them. In 2005 Songlines Recordings released the music on SACD.Īccording to Breskin, “My attraction to Frisell wasn’t because of his compositional style so much as his relationship with the electric guitar. There were poems, essays, superb reproductions of the works, and Frisell’s music on an inserted CD – one piece for each painting. The book, Richter 858, was published in connection with a comprehensive US retrospective of Richter’s work, although it focused entirely on a recent series of eight small abstract paintings numbered 858 1–8. In 2002 Bill Frisell was commissioned by producer David Breskin to create the music for an elaborate art book project on the great German painter Gerhard Richter. It is also available in DSD 512, 256 and 128. This is a Pure DSD album, recorded on Analog Tape and transferred to DSD 64. Restlessly creative guitarist Bill Frisell leads a hybrid string ensemble with noted improvisers Hank Roberts, Jenny Scheinman, and Eyvind Kang, in pieces inspired by the paintings of Gerhard Richter.
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