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Aydin Esen's new CD Light Years out on Extinction

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Extinction, a new label devoted to music of our time, is honored to announce the release of Light Years. This two-volume recording presents astonishing, never-before-heard works of composer Aydin Esen.

Though Mr. Esen has long been recognized in jazz circles as one of the of the most staggeringly gifted improvising artists of the past hundred years, his through-composed works have, until now, been a closely guarded secret, heard by a handful of close friends.

Those who may be familiar with Esen's recorded output and concert appearances in a variety of settings are due for a profound, even disconcerting shock, beginning with the opening track “Multiverse," an electronic realization of a gigantic orchestral score.

“Multiverse" unfolds in three parts, which run continuously and seem to reverberate across boundless distances, a series of ripples or cyclic pangs signaling the troubled births of multiple universes. The sound appears to come from everywhere at once, lingering statically, frozen in the depths of space, while at the same time (owing to the concentrated harmonic material and radical dynamics), displaying relentless forward motion.

As “Multiverse" recedes into impossible distance, “Sea Garden," a piano improvisation conceived and performed in real time at the Miam Studio, emerges. Here, a technique rising above the humanly possible marks out its terrain. The playing is ecstatic, insane. No other living musician could produce this rapturous gesture, which harkens back to the composer's youthful days as a performing virtuoso, while presenting aggressively new harmonic language and explosive rhythmic force. River upon river of new ideas, commentaries, insights, flood forth without limit.

38'12 of Light Years have elapsed. What follows in the remaining 25'42 of the first CD and the 71'54 of the second is for each listener to uncover. For me, Light Years is a deeply bluesy recording. It is also vast, lonely and cosmic. Light Years is joyous and ecstasy inducing; elsewhere, cerebral on a level which renders most “serious" music almost trivial by comparison.

Like all great art, Light Years eludes characterization. It is a form-shattering document of the artist's innermost musical life and a mirror of who we are. It is also a doorframe through which other worlds, delicate, terrifying, mysterious, eternal, fleeting, frozen, or heated to billions of degrees, are glimpsed.

An old commonplace declares there is nothing new under the sun. (How often this dreary point of view is reinforced in our daily life!) But Aydin Esen's music is a new thing under the sun--exquisite and mysterious.

Richard Harth
Executive Director, Extinction

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