Martin Brandlmayr Announces New Album 'Vive Les Fantomes'

Radian percussionist and composer Martin Brandlmayr has announced the release of his new album Vive Les Fantômes, out on June 14th. The radio play was created for German station SWR and awarded The Karl Sczuka Prize for Works of Radio Art, an honor previously given to the likes of John Cage, Luc Ferriari, Hanna Hartman, and Pierre Henry.

Vive Les Fantômes is based on snippets of interviews, rehearsals, and performances by people whose work influenced Brandlmayr's artistic path: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Jacques Derrida, Chris Marker, and many more. Brandlmayr creates connections between these materials in a network of sound objects that appear repeatedly changing their shape throughout the piece. Communication is constructed across different rooms and times, beyond the borders of language and music. Vive Les Fantômes is not only a piece of music, it's rather acoustic cinema with a non-linear narrative layer organized by scenes.

Vive Les Fantômes is influenced by Derrida´s book Spectres of Marx. A ghost is something unknown, something that we can´t really determine exactly, vague. A ghost can be an idea, a musical piece, a recording, a sentence that was said on tv or radio, that is interacting with us because it is resonating with us. Ghosts do something with us. They influence us. But the reverse is true as well: We do also interact with ghosts. So in the end it is about communication.

Original and found sounds, the core and backbone of the piece, are representatives of their time in general but also of the very moment when they have been created, with all its complexity, richness to be discovered. Vive Les Fantômes is a celebration of the musical moment, pointing to the past and to the future. Repetition is never repetition - it is always creation.