"Trios" refers to the relationship of two keyboards and the pedals of an organ, as performed by accomplished American composer Carson Cooman as he patiently unfolds Eva-Maria Houben's three minimal compositions exploring the relationships between three melodic lines or three-tone chords, presented on the Organ Probsteikirche St. Ludgerus, in Billerbeck, Germany.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: Germany Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels Recorded at Probsteikirche St. Ludgerus, in Billerbeck, Germany, in Janurary, 2021 by Travis O. Q. Poohe.
"The pacing is calm; the attack, decay, and shape of sounds quite soft - even corporeal low end rumblings assume a gossamer character; the duration of sounds is somewhat sustained; the volume is quiet; and the space is distant and open. The music appears to play in threes: three pieces for trio; three pieces for two keyboards and a pedal; each piece exploring overlapping relationships of three melodic lines or three-tone chords. Some of these overlapping relationships seem cells contained unto themselves, a plaited chorus divided in stanzas, their voices reduced to silence before beginning another progression, and some seem to leapfrog each other, the last remaining tone of a melody or chord the beginning of the next, sometimes separated by silences. But the silences are structured in such a way to indicate the presence of the soundings surrounding them, as if the pause of lines within overlapping segments happened to occur all at once. And among the mutable sequences of stacked tones, new pulses from their harmonic interactions come to light, the thrum, throb, and hum of organ quickening, slowing, stabilizing and sometimes seemingly resonating into the silence, the melodies and chords alive despite their quiet. The timbres and ambience here don't obscure the organ's ritual character - though its muted and measured aesthetics are more akin to a kind of quietism or asceticism than more brazen denominations - and the distance perceived in the recording accentuates it, as if something just beyond human - edificial, angelic, a dream."-Harmonic Series