New album – progress to date
Yes, we are working on our next album. I guess this is the period where there is the greatest gap between the “perceived” and real activity level of the band. For the past months I have been working on what will probably be the main piece of the album: a Concerto for Piano and Electric Ensemble. The album will probably be titled like that or “Concerto” for short. But who knows at this stage. “Omphalos” was going to be titled “Clepsydra” and “Ouroboros” was going to be the “Book of Imaginary Beings”… The concert will be structured in four movements. Two of them, the second and third, are based on pieces from a piano work I wrote in the mid 90′s called “Book of Brief Images”. I always felt that these short piano pieces had some ideas that required extensive development and now I found the perfect place for them to grow to their fullest extent. I began with the 3rd Movement – a Scherzo that lasts around 9 minutes. This movement already forms part of our live repertoire and we will play it in Crescendo Festival this summer. Then I went on with the 4th Movement. It is finished (around 14 minutes) and we will start working on it after the summer. I’m sort of half-way through the 2nd movement and not a single note written for the 1st. There’s also some material written that do not form part of the Concert and of course the album will also feature at least one piece written by Cesar. Adriana will be the soloist for the Concerto (both live and in the album). It is quite an ambitious and elaborate project, so it will take some time to complete. As any other piano concerto, it is a technical challenge, demanding from Adriana a fair number of study hours in front of the instrument.
From an aesthetic point of view, the Concerto draws from a number of influences – from the traditional language of the Romantic piano concertos of the 19th Century, to Villa-Lobos or Ginastera, and of course, a gentle amount of rock as well. As with the previous work done in Kotebel, our approach to the integration of these diverse languages is not to mix them in such a way that you can notice its constituent elements, but rather to integrate them seamlessly.
We hope to have the album ready for release next year, but at this stage it’s still too early to make an accurate estimate. We will let you know how work progresses in the upcoming months.
Carlos.
