!K7’S mirror-image modern compositional and ambient offshoot label, !7K, has announced the latest in its ongoing series of digital-only, wide-ranging, thematic compilations, and this time the focus will be on wind instruments.
Following Piano Layers, Strings Layers and last winter’s erudite and necessary Ambient Layers (read our review of that one, here), Wind Layers gathers together 21 tracks by 21 artists, who “… elaborate and experiment with the history of wind music composition and performance.”
Hand in hand with the announcement, the label has twitched the curtain aside just a teensy bit to allow one track of the 21 out as a taster; it’s the track “Beyond The Break”, by Canadian-American multireedist, who of course adds that dimension to work by Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre, Tom Waits and others.
Colin’s contribution distills his world into 92 seconds of high-impact breath work on the bass saxophone; atmospheric, cyclical, ghostly. There’s a lot inside that minute and a half.
“Originally recorded as part of my last solo record, All This I Do For Glory, “Beyond The Brake” is a turning of attention back towards where and what was left behind,” he says.
“It is that one last look before the page turns, before the next thought emerges and this one falls away.
“All This I Do For Glory was always intended as one side of a coin, and so I thought it fitting to share this piece now, in the time before the flipside comes to be.”
Assembled elsewhere on Wind Layers you’ll find Hamburg pianist, producer and composer Niklas Paschburg, contributing a piece conceived for accordion which uses sound recorded from different home appliances, including his kettle; James-Holden collaborator Ralph Heidel; and contributions from the jazz side of the spectrum from Peter Zummo and Arthur Russell.
More recherché explorations come from Barabás Lőrinc, who navigates on the edges of kraut, jazz and electro, while Germany’s One Earth Orchestra plot a similar course between jazz, folk and classical; Rome’s jazz trumpeter Giovanni Di Cosimo features, as do Dylan Henner; Ben Bentrand, collaborating with Margaret Hermant, of Echo Collective, and US free jazz searcher Steph Richards dialogues with Adam Cuthbert.
7K!’s various artists – Wind Layers will be released digitally on June 25th; you can pre-order your copy here.
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