Ambient artist & Efterklang collaborator Christian Balvig shares new single 'Everything's Coloured'
Ambient artist Christian Balvig shares new single 'Everything's Coloured'
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Debut album Night Poem will be released on May 12th
"... a closely mic’ed piano with all of its beautiful mechanic sounds, just enough bass to give it the platform it needs to sustain the sparkling synth arpeggios and backing acoustic percussion." Headphone Commute
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On May 12th, Danish composer Christian Balvig is set to release his debut solo album Night Poem. The album is an ode to and from the night, a rebellion against constant stimuli, and a meticulous hunt for ghost notes and the almost imperceptible sound of piano keys. Today he has shared new single 'Everything's Coloured', an ode to holding back.
Known for his work scoring the hit Scandinavian drama series Cry Wolf (Walter Presents) as well as his work with Danish band Efterklang, renowned orchestras like The Royal Danish Orchestra, Copenhagen Philharmonic and The Danish Chamber Orchestra, Balvig is preparing to release his first album as a solo artist. Night Poem is a magical record written for and in the dark of night.
While daytime is full of noise and jobs, the night offers a sense of spaciousness. “It made sense to me that my first record should start there, in that counterpoint to stimuli,” he explains, continuing: “I feel as though it has become more difficult to find the core of your creativity in a world filled with so much input and stimulus.”
The night became a space that Balvig would escape to, in which it was simply easier to be in touch with himself. This is the sensation that Night Poem is intended to induce in the listener too, inviting them to lean closer into the sound as if listening intently to a whisper, rather than bombarding them with sensory impressions.
Of his new single, Balvig says:
"'Everything's Coloured' is about holding back. Being a somewhat introvert person, sometimes just holding back and waiting can help me make a difficult decision. One important composition exercise I was given as a teen by Butch Lacy, who apparently got it from Lee Konitz, was to just sit down in front of my instrument and wait. Wait until a note or sound would appear in my imagination, even if it took an eternity.
'Everything's Colored' was composed and recorded after the regulators in my apartment complex implemented a "no noise or music" rule. I had to play everything as soft as possible, on the edge to no sound at all. Being on that edge where the actual "tone" is as soft as possible I find that the whole textural world around that tone feels louder and brings out the hidden ethereal qualities of the instrument playing that tone."
Balvig says it is perfectly fine to fall asleep to the sound of the album, but if listening more alertly, you might be lucky enough to discover the sound of a piano key lifting, a ghost note emerging from a violin, or perhaps even a muffled cough from the audience at a concert in Aarhus. In a way, the beginnings of the album can be traced back, if not to that exact cough, then at least to the recording he made that night in Aarhus.
Balvig had been commissioned to compose a work for a string sextet in response to Schönberg’s ‘Verklärte Nacht’. That in turn became a night concert, the live recording of which was some of the first material the composer brought to the summerhouse where he continued to rework it.
“I spent a lot of time awake in the nighttime, playing on top of those recordings,” he explains. The most important aspect soon became the sense of aliveness found in the recording: that the performance brought together people playing and people listening, and how the accumulative sound of that was captured. It was this collective energy he brought with him into his solo space, and the first track on the record - ‘In The Night’ - is made up primarily of live recordings from that night.
Solitude is essential to the album, which also contains other live recordings, as well as discarded commissions and improvisations, all of which have been sucked into and processed through Balvig’s cosmic machine. As an artist, Balvig has been experimenting with his sound, searching for who he is when he is not reflecting himself in others, “and when I do not react to and reflect all the stimuli and feedback I get from the outside world all the time.”
In its entirety, the track list for Night Poem makes up a poem for the night:
In The Night
We Stumble Upon A Planet
A Spiders Web
Inside Us
Everything’s Coloured
Around Us
Waiting Bliss
Reverberating
The Overlooked Views
Where All Is
