Quiet Riots | Peter Herbert & Wolfgang Mitterer
Peter Herbert amd Wolfgang Mitterer are coming into a scene with their cd album released as a duo. Both have been experienced in different aspects of contemporary music - Peter as a composer for different ensembles and chamber music, Wolfgang on the other hand has been using different performance strategies playing organ, piano in various conceptual areas.
''Quiet riots'' is somewhat a compromise between different approaches and experimentation. I was very close to describe this album as a ''smooth jazz'' but stopped myself halfway there as obviously smoothness comes in a different form here - not through the implosion of the known and much despised genre but more in terms of how the connecting all different aspects of this music: Jazz improvisation, plunderphonics even, electroacoustic techniques and electronics blend perfectly.
It is not merely some collective mash-up of ideas or idle eclectics but a carefully designed space where everything has its own place and plays the part well.
Since 2003 Peter Herbert has been working and living in Paris and Vienna after 16 years in NYC and plays an average of 100 concerts a year with about 100.000 miles of annual traveling distances in precorona-times. As a much in demand ’sideman’ he collaborated in the past with musicians like Marc Copland/John Abercrombie Quartett, Bobby Previte's "The Horse", John Clark Octet, Robin Eubanks 'Mental Images’, or Marcel Khalife. His work has been well documented on well over 180 CD-recordings (incl. Paul Simon). Peter Herbert is also a versatile composer with works for various orchestras and chamber groups like the ensemble plus, SOV, absolute ensemble in NYC, a recent work is his opera ‘Trans Maghreb’ for the Bregenzer Festspiele 2014. He established his own Internet-based label Aziza Music in 1999 (www.azizamusic.com). Since 2007 Herbert has been teaching bass, improvisation and composition at the JIM at the Anton-Bruckner Privat University in Linz and recently started curating the strenge Kammer at Vienna’s Porgy&Bess.
Wolfgang Mitterer studied organ, composition and electroacoustics in Vienna and Stockholm. He is not only one of the Austrian specialists for electronics as well as being equally brilliant on the keyboard and on the slide controls, but is also one of the most innovative composers. His work oscillates between composition and open form. Apart from music for organ and orchestra, a piano concerto and an opera he has produced electronic pieces, conceptualized sound installations, and engaged in collective improvisation with diverse groups, developing a language of extremes, tension and complexity. The pleasure he takes in experimenting leads him to combine contrasting elements in the creation of unpredictable musical events. In one major composition, for instance, he juxtaposes musical bands and children’s choirs with specialized instrumentalists and singers, while filling the hall with surround sound created by live electronics. But his work transcends the merely spectacular, precisely because of his musical presence and the high – deeply moving – intensity and complexity of his compositions. Listening intensely to low sounds has its place just as much as the “installing” of exploding sound fragments in the listeners’ minds. Far from being smoothly pleasurable, Mitterer’s music is still uncannily beautiful at times.
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