Samuel Reinhard - Miniatures (2020)

On Miniatures, his first release under his own name, Swiss artist, composer, and producer @samuelreinhard looks back to his early work as a sound artist and his exchanges with visual artists, as well as to the indeterminate techniques of mid-century experimental composers, to produce a sonic path forward that’s as refined as it is evocative. Consolidating long-running traits from his multi-faceted practice—reduction, repetition, a focus on texture—Reinhard finds a place from which to open up his practice by synthesizing what’s essential.

While Miniatures is built from recordings of short piano gestures decaying towards silence, amid the four movements that comprise the suite, something else grows. Reinhard has arranged piano samples within a system devised to allow him to remove himself a few degrees from the process of composition; notes cycle, collide, and wash away within boundaries the artist has set, but in their wake new processual textures develop. A hiss blankets the harmonic material, clicks that once marked sharp cuts between repetitions become a percussive undercurrent. From these asynchronous continuums, subtle harmonics emerge. Devoid of breaks or narration, sounds interact with each other like the cells of an organism.

Working with digital tools, Reinhard conjures the interior of an animate environment that’s ever-changing. Whatever blossoms in the mind while taking in these compositions, we’re surrendered to the feeling of being still while moving forward, an invitation to notice the small stuff that swells when we settle in with duration. Focused in palette but rangy in its evolving grain, Miniatures is a generative composition brimming with intricate, lively detail below its cool surface.

Since completing an MA in Contemporary Arts Practice at Bern University of the Arts in 2015, Reinhard’s output has taken many shapes, ranging from collaborations with visual artists, experimental solo releases under various monikers, production work for a wide variety of artists, as well as installation work that has been shown in Europe, Asia, and the United States.