Home » Jazz News » Video / DVD

5

Songlines Recordings Posts Richter 858 Video On You Tube

Source:

Sign in to view read count
Long-Form Video, Originally Featured on 2005 Album by Bill Frisell, Has Not Been Available For Viewing since Middle of 2000s

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. 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 – 858-8. The book included poems, essays, superb reproductions of the artworks, and Frisell’s music on an inserted CD—one piece for each painting.

When Songlines’ owner Tony Reif was approached about releasing the recording separately he suggested enhancing the music in two ways: remastering it from analogue to DSD for maximum sound quality as an SACD, and creating a CD-ROM slideshow that would present the paintings and many details together with MP3s of the pieces they’d inspired, demonstrating analogies between visual art and music that Breskin and Frisell had been working with.

The RICHTER 858 SACD was released in 2005 (and re-released as a CD in 2010), but technological advances soon made it impossible for most people to access the Flash slideshow, as new computers began to use Intel processors instead of the less powerful Power PC processors for which the show was designed. So, for the past seven or eight years, few have been able to experience the powerful combination of Frisell’s compositions, beautifully performed by Frisell with the group that has come to be known as the 858 Quartet—Hank Roberts on cello, Jenny Scheinman on violin and Eyvind Kang on viola—and Richter’s gorgeous abstract art.

In November 2012, marking the 10th anniversary of the creation and first release of the Richter 858 music, Vancouver New Music presented the 858 Quartet at the Vancouver Playhouse, and their second set featured the Richter 858 compositions plus (for the only time) projections of the paintings and details that appeared in the slideshow, on a large screen behind the performers. The concert was a huge success, and Reif started thinking about how to make the slideshow available again in some form. Redoing it using the current version of Flash was a possibility, but it was felt that the application itself had a limited future, plus the amount of space on an enhanced CD did not allow either the visuals or the music to be presented in high quality. Eventually Reif decided to have the slideshow reconstructed as a 720p video, with 44.1K AAC sound, and make it freely available. The 48 minute video is now on YouTube.



According to Breskin (who had produced two previous Frisell records, Smash & Scatteration, duets with Vernon Reid, and Power Tools’ Strange Meeting): “My attraction to Frisell wasn’t because of his compositional style so much as his relationship with the electric guitar. 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. And yet neither Richter nor Frisell have perfect control of the process, and things happen which they can’t predict.”

Now in his 80s, Gerhard Richter is one of the pioneers of the New European Painting that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Richter has produced both abstract and photorealistic paintings, as well as photographs and glass pieces. In the tradition of 20th century artists such as Picasso and Jean Arp, Richter’s vast creative output is testament to his refusal to adhere to the concept of an artist's obligation to maintain a single unified style. Similarly, Frisell’s compositions are somewhat of a departure for the guitarist, who says, “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.”

Visit Website

For more information contact .

Comments

Tags

Concerts

News

Popular

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.