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PARTE 019LP
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"He was the best. There is no one who comes close to him. I mean in his humanity, and the depth of his performance, there is no one like him." --Werner Herzog on Bruno S.
These exclusive recordings of Bruno S' music were made in Berlin in 2009 shortly before his untimely death at the age of 78. They capture perfectly his distinctive voice, accompanied by accordion and glockenspiel, in the places where he performed for many years -- the streets of Berlin, a local tavern, and his own apartment. Bruno S was a street musician and painter who first came to public attention through the two films he starred in for director Werner Herzog, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) and Stroszek (1977), a film that in some part was based on Bruno's own life. He was born in 1932, likely in Berlin, to a prostitute who placed him in a mental hospital as a child, where he was subjected to Nazi experiments. Bruno would go on to spend 23 years in institutions, including jails and homeless shelters. As an adult he began to perform on the street as well as working as a forklift driver, before ultimately catching Herzog's eye. The common themes of Bruno's street ballads, folk songs and operettas are crime, abandonment, passion, and, perhaps most significantly, the role of the mother. In dealing with his troubled life, Bruno pulled himself out of isolation through his art, at first through music, and later also through his paintings and drawings. This beautiful record is pressed on 180 gram audiophile vinyl and features a large format full-color booklet containing lyrics, liner-notes and reproductions of several of Bruno's paintings and drawings.
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LP
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PARTE 020LP
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"The Traumdeutung project began in 1999 with a one-hour recording of my snoring into a DAT player placed next to my bed in my NYC loft. My snores, re-contextualized here in musical arrangements produced by Arto Lindsay and Alexandre Kassin, range from the mild and blissful to the vulgar and catastrophic. My original intention was to turn something awful into something listenable or, at least, amusing. However, in the mixing stage, unexpected results were revealed and oblique references came into play. The human snore, if slowed down as we did several times in the studio searching for editing points, is almost identical to the sounds of plaintive underwater whales. In listening to these mixes one follows the moods, if not the actual narratives, of the dreamer -- sudden changes in snoring clearly result from changes within inner narratives. These are abstract matters, as we can only witness such inner events through a series of filters. Traumdeutung, the album, is linked to the modern bossa music of Brazil. The meditative or relaxation-inducing aspect of that music is hyper-conceptualized and exaggerated here. Bossa nova drummer Paulo Braga was first asked to accompany the bare snoring track. Later musicians and friends added parts -- guitar, bass, keyboards, samples, etc. Four tracks with spoken conversations are on the album, two in German, one in Portuguese and one in Japanese. The most satisfying result of this project was to create an opportunity for a listener to read or interpret the stream of thought of the snorer -- what brut moods, feelings and narratives exist within it. In these awkward and displaced sounds we can witness abstract processes of telepathy and psychic communication." --Diego Cortez; Pressed in a limited edition of 300 copies on 180 gram audiophile vinyl. Includes a 12x12 insert with liner notes.
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