Asher Thal-Nir: His label Sourdine a fact
Starting a new label has become as commonplace as the daily news , but when Asher Thal-Nir announced the official launch of his, Sourdine, only yesterday, we were all ears. After his much-anticipated “the depths, the colors, the objects and the silence” on Mytery Sea, which again took his music to new territory, Thal-Nir’s style has become a synonym for combining clinical sound dissections and strict adherence to certain formal parameters with deep emotional resonances. As such, it should seem more than interesting to see whether a record company headed by him will be able of expanding upon this style with corresponding work by other artists. Conceptually, Sourdine is still very much open, the site merely informing us that it is “run by Asher Thal-Nir”. Then of course, a “sourdine” is a muting and muffling device intended to lower the volume of an object – which already points at the quiet nature of future albums. Logically, then, the first artists roster of Sourdine reads like a who is who in the field of lower case music.
Included on the Sourdine page are Jason Kahn, Heribert Friedl, Ubeboet (Miguel A. Tolosa), Steinbrüchel, John Hudak, Kenneth Kirschner and Steve Roden, who all have all become a part of Asher Thal-Nir’s team and feature on Sourdine’s first release: “graceful degradation: variations”. The original of the “graceful degradation” album had been released on Tolosa’s Con-V label in a limited edition of 50 copies and saw Asher clearing out his case of old cassettes filled with recordings of him playing a piano he had bought on the streets of Brooklyn for 75 dollars. Now, he has opened the vault of that project even more and handed his artistic friends five tracks to use as source material for their reworkings. While these tracks will be freely downloadable from the Sourdine Webspace for a limited amount of time, the variations are to be published on CD in September – this time in a much larger print run of 500. Already these scetches promise great things to come: Dreamy piano clusters and loose tones drifting in seas of crackles, hiss and scratches turn these long soundscapes into a miniature work of its own and a nice welcome gift.
Next to his work for Sourdine, Asher Thal-Nir is set to follow up on “the depths, the colors, the objects and the silence” with a DVD-R release on Swiss label Leerraum among others.
Homepage: Sourdine Records
Homepage: Asher Thal-Nir at MySpace
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