Warp

Jon Balke

Warp situates the solo piano of Norway’s Jon Balke within a subtle architecture of composed soundscapes , in fluctuating dimensions of space. “As always,” says Balke, “the more you explore and discover, the further you want to go, and things are not so simple anymore. It’s a very interesting process.” And what begins as gently exploratory solo piano gradually acquires an almost hallucinatory aspect. Balke’s solo piano was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio, and the sound images were recorded and processed by Balke and Audun Kleive. Additional field recordings by Balke were integrated in the mix of the album at RSI Studio Lugano in September 2015. Warp was produced by Jon Balke and Manfred Eicher.

Inmitten einer subtilen Architektur aus komponierten Soundscapes wird auf Warp das Soloklavier des Norwegers Jon Balke hinein in fluktuierende Dimensionen des Raumes platziert. „Es ist, wie immer“, so Balke, „je mehr Du erforschst und entdeckst, desto weiter willst Du gehen, und desto schwieriger gestalten sich die Dinge dann. Das ist ein wirklich interessanter Prozess.“ Und was als sanfte Erkundung auf dem Soloklavier beginnt, gewinnt allmählich halluzinatorische Aspekte. Balkes Soloklavieraufnahme wurde im Rainbow Studio in Oslo gemacht, die Klangbilder von Balke selbst und Audun Kleive aufgenommen und weiterverarbeitet. Im September 2015 wurden außerdem noch zusätzliche Feldaufnahmen Balkes in die Albummischung im RSI Studio in Lugano integriert. Warp wurde von Jon Balke und Manfred Eicher produziert.

Featured Artists

Jon BalkePiano, Sound Images
Mattis MyrlandVocals
Wenche LosnegaardVocals
Ellinor Myskja BalkeAnnouncement Reading

Recorded

September 2014, Rainbow Studio, Oslo

1Heliolatry
(Jon Balke)03:19
2This Is The Movie
(Jon Balke)05:18
3Bucolic
(Jon Balke)04:05
4On And On
(Jon Balke)04:56
5Bolide
(Jon Balke)04:51
6Amarinthine
(Jon Balke)03:03
7Shibboleth
(Jon Balke)02:47
8Mute
(Jon Balke)01:15
9Slow Spin
(Jon Balke)04:22
10Boodle
(Jon Balke)02:25
11Dragoman
(Jon Balke)03:41
12Kantor
(Jon Balke)04:04
13Geminate
(Jon Balke)00:52
14Telesthesia
(Jon Balke)01:28
15Geminate var.
(Jon Balke)01:58
16Heliolatry var.
(Jon Balke)03:51

Each of Norwegian pianist Jon Balke’s ECM albums has opened another window on the processes of improvisation. On Warp, a sound-sculpted meditation on the nature of solo playing, Balke looks at the ways in which “a lone musician, in his cloud of aesthetics, interacts with the world, or how the world warps into his space. How the world reverberates into art and vice versa.”

The starting point this time was the idea of situating the piano “in an architecture of sound”, incorporating field recordings with “distant homogenous sounds of city life”. Initial recordings of solo piano were made in sessions at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug. The next stage was to work with Audun Kleive at Madstun in the Norwegian hills using elements of electronics, sound, field recordings and more.

The music on Warp incorporates both pure solo and subtly enhanced piano, with additional information and mysterious half-buried detail. Balke’s field recordings include, for instance, sounds of a schoolyard, sounds of trams braking at the stoplights near the pianist’s Oslo home, ambient sounds from the Hagia Sofia church-mosque-museum in Istanbul. Singers Mattis Myrland and Wenche Losnegaard put in distant appearances, contributing to a layer of songs, hidden deep in the soundscape. To thicken the plot, Balke’s daughter Ellinor reads an airport announcement in three variations. Many other details can be perceived in the furthest corners of the mix.

In preparing his sound images, Jon also used a long list of keyboards, samplers and software to shape the setting in which his piano is heard. “Then we brought these hours of music back to Rainbow with Manfred Eicher involved, for more recordings and focusing of the results,

which we mixed in Lugano a few months later, with Stefano Amerio as engineer.” Sequencing was finalized by Eicher and Balke and the album mastered at Munich’s MSM Studio with Christoph Stickel.