Vera Kappeler & Peter Conradin Zumthor - Babylon-Suite (2014) [Hi-Res]

Swiss musicians Vera Kappeler and Peter Conradin Zumthor recorded this ECM debut album in spring 2013, following their appearance at Munich's Haus der Kunst as part of the programme surrounding the exhibition 'ECM - A Cultural Anthology'. "Music of the future!" was how that performance was described by one critic.

In their shared work, percussionist Zumthor explores the melodic and textural potential of the drums, and pianist Kappeler demarcates her own poetic cosmos by playing in a way that is "neither naïve nor complex, yet decidedly different", as journalist Peter Rüedi has written. "In her own strange way she is the most exciting pianist of the moment."

The stories, myths and images around Babylon is a source of inspiration for the music. Kappeler's and Zumthor's Babylon is not the one with the Tower but the Babylon of the Babylonian Captivity, the Book of Daniel (including the episode in the lion's den), Nebuchadnezzar's dreams, the three young men singing in the fiery furnace, Belshazzar's writing on the wall and the Apocalypse (the suite's opening number is entitled "The First Beast"). Babylon is a place of perdition, of hopelessness, a labyrinth. The suite was premiered at the Origen Festival Cultural 2012 in the damp, cold, reverberant cavern of the Swiss hydroelectric power plant at Tinizong.

Kappeler plays the piano (occasionally prepared), toy piano and harmonium, with Zumthor on timpani, drums, bells, sound bowls, cymbals, and at the end, for an instant, a ghostly punch-card barrel organ. Though this list might sound like an accumulation of sound effects, in fact it produces an exceptionally co¬herent overall composition of dynamic contrasts, sophisticated disso¬nances, aggressive give and take, towering phalanxes of chords, trills evaporating into irreality and overtones wafting gently away.

Personnel: Vera Kappeler (piano, harmonium, toypiano, voice), Peter Conradin Zumthor (drums, toypiano, voice)