Henrik Schwarz & Alma Quartet Announce New Album

Legendary deep house producer and DJ, Henrik Schwarz, will release his latest album on the 24th of May together with Alma Quartet. CCMYK, is a collaboration between the German producer and the Dutch string quartet where both take their individual instruments and musical backgrounds to create a new universe of sound.

Schwarz has been exploring this fertile terrain between classical, electronic and dance music for almost a decade. Having produced some of the most elegant dance records of the 2000s, he has spent much of his later years collaborating with jazz musicians, orchestras, writing ballets, and reconfiguring canonical classical works.

In 2015, Schwarz invited the four players of the Alma String Quartet to his studio in Berlin, where they began working on a series of improvisations. Schwarz would suggest a musical phrase, and one of the Alma Quartet members would play in response, with another then taking up the idea and complementing it. This process saw highly trained classical musicians playing and recording as a jazz band. Schwarz would respond to their classical creations with his own electronic productions. He would then take these half hour jamshome and edit them down, sculpting them into coherent tracks. During this process he would add electronic melodies and beats, sometimes inviting the quartet musician back to respond to the alterations thus carefully building and refining each song.

CCMYK is a free-flowing conversation between classical and electronic music, with tracks that are as fitting for a club as they are for a concert hall.

Henrik Schwarz will present his new project during his Cercle Music Session at Cathedrale de Chartres, which will be broadcasted live on the 20th May. More information here.

The record will be released live on the 24th May at a show at Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, NL.