Of all the structures that The Pitch uses to play their pieces, the Frozen Surface strategy is perhaps the one that is most easily shared with additional musicians. Pitches are chosen from a small, slowly changing gamut and played as long and stable as possible by all musicians in order to create a slow moving layer of dense material that is held up in the air by the balancing act of choices each player makes in terms of register, pitch class, color, dynamics and everything else musical that comes to mind, in a framework that, seemingly limited as it is, is in fact quite liberating as it blurs the perception of time and builds a communication between the musicians that seems almost extra-sensory. The additional electronics (in this case Revox echo-loops by Valerio Tricoli) add an extra sense of time floating freely: an arrested underwater world of colors slowly blending into each other.

This piece was performed for a live audience at LEAP, Berlin as a 66 minute piece with no breaks. On this release it is slightly shortened and cut into four pieces with added fade ins and outs. It can now be considered a suite of four variations or it can still be imagined to be part of an everlasting gradient.


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The Pitch is a Berlin-based ensemble founded in 2009. With acoustic instruments and minimal live-electronics they collectively compose structures which generate hypnotic melodic movement and deep acoustic textures. Bowed and struck vibraphone tones resonate with bowed bass harmonics, doubled by clarinet and reinforced by organ and sine tones. An intensely focused performance creates an atmosphere where the listeners perception is slowed down to make the smallest sonic details move from background to foreground. The group continually expands into new terrain of musical material and playing styles inspired by fundamental states of matter (and variations thereof) - frozen surfaces, gaseous states, plasmatic fibrils, liquid patterns and molecular motion.

Frozen Orchestra: in this project The Pitch plays a long version of one of their "frozen" structures extended with up to 10 players to form a small orchestra. This large ensemble creates an extremely rich, slowly moving textural sound. As The Frozen Orchestra they have played at Sonic Acts Festival (Amsterdam) Platform Project (Moscow), Roter Salon / Volksbühne (Berlin), NK (Berlin) and LEAP (Berlin).

Boris Baltschun - electric pump organ
Koen Nutters - upright bass
Morten J Olsen - vibraphone
Michael Thieke - clarinet.

With Chris Heenan - bass clarinet
Matthias Müller - trombone
Biliana Voutchkova - violin
Johnny Chang - viola
Valerio Tricoli - revox.


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