Miroslav Posejpal - Shapes Of The Moment (First sketches 2013–2015) (2023) Hi Res

The album Shapes Of The Moment [First sketches 2013–2015] complements the two previously released albums in a three-part collection covering the decade 2013–2023. The music on it came to existence between 2013–2015 – a time when Miroslav Posejpal, after spending most of his musical career in collective projects, began to focus almost exclusively on his own work at home, using his original instruments, guitar and bass guitar. After recording the material, now a selection concentrated on this album, two thematic albums followed. Stellar Voices, recorded between 2018 and 2020, and subsequently Songs Of The Ocean, recorded between 2021 and 2023. These albums could hardly have been made, however, without the preparatory phase captured here, when musical and expressive possibilities were systematically explored, often reaching truly extreme positions. Without mapping out the possibilities and limits of digital effects and the actual possibility of controlling them while playing the instrument in real time.

„The material used for Shapes Of The Moment [First sketches 2013–2015] was created at a time when all the collective projects I was involved in had gradually ended and I decided to continue on my own. The basic input to the beginning was mainly the experience of spontaneous creation in the mentioned cooperative projects, whether in the acoustic duo with Jiří Durman, or in the electroacoustic projects Paraneuro, GAMe and IQ+1. Next, the effects apparatus created mainly for playing with ParaNeuro, a lot of suggestions and unrealized ideas and finally, hardly mined from the memory, shards of forgotten memories of playing on completely different strings. The experience could be summed up in a nutshell by saying that if one lets the music one plays flow freely and does not consciously and deliberately direct or influence it in any way, the resulting music mirrors one‘s inner self and becomes a kind of imprint of one‘s soul. A landscape of the mind. And at the same time a unique capture of the form of the moment in which the music was born. Unique and unrepeatable.

While working in the Paraneuro trio, I managed to connect three ZOOM multi-effects to create a sonic aggregate that allowed me to transform the cello sound to a degree that went far beyond the normal boundaries of instrument effects, mainly thanks to the three expression pedals on the main effect, which allowed me to transform the sound in real time in such a way that it sounded like some bizarre prehistoric synthesizer and had almost artistic dimensions. Playing with it was an adventure, because it behaved in some positions in a rather surprising and unpredictable way, and the whole thing was a bit of a ‚looking-glass‘ experience. And then when I added guitar and bass to the device, the results turned out to be perhaps even more unexpected and unusual than when playing with the cello. But in truth it wasn‘t too surprising. All the effects were guitar, of course. Thus, at that time, I was finally able to follow through with an approach to playing that I had been consciously and often unconsciously working towards over the years, especially in Paraneur, which could be paraphrased in modern terms as WYHIWIP –What You Hear Is What I Play – with play being meant exclusively in a strictly ‚old-school‘ sense.

Hands (and feet) on the instrument (and effects). No computers, no plug-ins, no Ableton, no virtual instruments, no keyboards, no MIDI controllers and no field recordings... Just strings and wires. ... From this point of view, it is also possible to see the featured stories and sketches as a kind of small inventory of the possibilities afforded to the contemporary instrumentalist by the use of digital effects, what sonic realms these possibilities can take him into, and how these strategies expand the expressive possibilities of his instrument and his musical vocabulary in general. ... Then when I started recording my first attempts, I was so enchanted by the expressive possibilities and the sonic clarity of the result that I didn‘t think about it any further in any complicated way and just let myself be carried away by the sound and the atmosphere of the passing moment and recorded and recorded. It was as if some windows were opening into my subconscious, into memories of other lives, into unknown places, times and worlds. This created moments and atmospheres that spoke to me very strongly and put me in a state where one can only perceive what is born under one‘s hands... and everything starts to live its own life. It has always been like that – whether with Jirka, or with Paraneuro, or with others. The music creates itself, you just have to not stand in its way and let the power of the moment guide you.“ — Miroslav Posejpal