Kees Tazelaar

Tip! *Signature Series IV, edition of 300 copies* Kees Tazelaar is the fourth composer in the Metaphon Signature Series, which last time gave a full LP to the tape pieces of Robert Nasveld. Tazelaar is Dutch, studied with Jan Boerman, one of the pioneers of electronic music in the Netherlands, and has led the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague for many years. He is also a historian of the field, the author of several books on the first years of electronic music in the Netherlands and Germany. His own music belongs to the electroacoustic and acousmatic tradition and follows the line of the sonology pioneers, Gottfried Michael Koenig above all, who directed the institute in its Utrecht years: the form comes from algorithms and tightly organised systems, not from improvisation, and formal rigour goes together with a rich sound and a careful use of space.

The record is the first release of two recent works, one per side. Serenade lasts about sixteen minutes, Staub der Sterne close to nineteen, and both are built around De Profundis, the poem by Georg Trakl. Staub der Sterne was first meant as a coda to Serenade and grew into a piece of its own, so the two sides can be heard as a pair or apart. Voices bring the text into the electronic material: Siàn Wassermann sings in Serenade and speaks the introduction to Staub der Sterne, where Annija Krivjonoka sings and Leslee Smucker plays the violin. Around them the sound is entirely composed by Tazelaar, who also did the mastering.

Production by Timo van Luijk, design by Meeuw, photo by Marianne Dekker. Like the Nasveld volume before it, the pressing is limited to 300 copies. Tazelaar has spent much of his working life writing the history of the first Dutch and German studios, and these two pieces show that line still at work today: music built with the same discipline, now carrying Trakl's lines through a contemporary acousmatic space.