SEPTEMBER COLLECTIVE - Always Breathing Monster
LP/CD/Digital, Mosz 021
Streetdate: November 30
http://www.mosz.org
http://www.myspace.com/septembercollective

BARBARA MORGENSTERN, STEFAN SCHNEIDER & PAUL WIRKUS

September Collective's new album Always Breathing Monster [mosz021] is their second release on mosz. The basic idea was to work with midified church organ sounds. At Johannes church, a big protestant church located in the center of Dusseldorf they had the possibility to work the huge organ and the resonance of the sanctuary. The musicians fed the organ with the prepared MIDI-arrangements and recorded the new midified organ sounds with microphones set up inside the church.

The open compositions that found their way onto the album are fragments, sketches of subtlety which let the impression of the organ's vastness evoke - defragmented somehow, but also playful in some other moments. The different styles of Morgenstern, Schneider and Wirkus merge to an organic whole maintaining the individual characteristics of the three of them. [mosz 2009]

What the musicians say about the album in their own words:

"For September Collective meetings our preferred way of working is to search for nontypical places and situations. Each of us has also some other musical obligations, so it's important for us that whenever we have the time to meet and work as September Collective we want to do something special. The curiosity to work with an unfamiliar instrument like the organ was quite strong. We had arranged the MIDI-files on the computer before and fed the organ then with them. Apart from the practical work with the manuals and the mechanics of the organ there was the recording process: we set up microphones inside the church. At this point occured the important aspect was the context and the history of the church organ - which tones can one get out of such a prestressed instrument? It is interesting that an instrument which is used for such sacral and ritual music owns characteristics that are very profane: magnificence and power, humility and vastness. Within ca 7 hours we recorded several improvisations as trio, duo and solo on the organ and on the piano underneath the gallery. We could experience a tiny emancipation of the organ and found many subtle, delicate, fragile sounds - we were moving in previously unknown micro- and macro dimensions. It was wonderful to see how our three different ways of sound-processing worked out and became one whole - but still with recognisable features of our individual, partly seriously different styles. After some months September Collective played our first concert - there we decided to use only sounds of that session at Johannes church for our improvisations. Further concerts using the organ sounds followed; and after a while these open compositions had emerged from the sessions and were ready to be processed for the new album. At the studio of an artist friend we worked 5 days on the material for the album."

DISCOGRAPHY:
September Collective, Geographic 2004
All the Birds Were Anarchists, Mosz 2007