2 x 10″ vinyl – Arbitrary

Copenhagen-based musician and composer Mads Emil Nielsen generally works with hybrid sources, made from sounds combined with glitches, calibrated drums and orchestral samples. The eclectic experimenter founded his own label, Arbitrary, in 2014, while in the same year he launched the series Framework, a collection of hand drawn graphic scores including both his projects and those of other artists. Framework 1 is mostly made from scores that are visually and conceptually inspired by the Treatise of Cornelius Cardew. Framework 2 is the result of a residency at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) in Stockholm. This draws inspiration from graphic scores and from other musicians, including Andrea Neumann, with whom he makes improvisations according to a series of seven fragments of graphic scores. Initially this 4-channel composition, “Framework Fragments”, was presented as a part of the sound installation Creepage Current in Berlin, Copenhagen and Milan, in 2018 and 2019. On the second transparent vinyl, Jan Jelinek works on “Circles”, following the basic time structure-sequence of the composition and translating the elements into three separate loops. These get mixed inside and outside, one after the other, encircled by additional aleatory sounds and scattered improvised weaves, which then give life to more complex, beating and sidereal articulations. Hideki Umezawa composes the closing chapter. Here he uses a Serge Modular Music System, an analogue modular synthesizer from the seventies. The material recorded during the residency was carefully reorganised and modified by Nielsen in 9 minutes of pure distilled sound material which is abstract, beating and cosmic. The architectural and visual approach, which uses a limited number of sounds, proves successful in this release, brilliant in its quality and spatialization.
 

Mads Emil Nielsen + Various Artists – Framework 2