A portrait album dedicated to the music of American composer Mark Barden in which I am featured with Ensemble Kangforum Wien performing Barden’s “Flesh Veil” for large ensemble. Another note worthy work by Barden that includes electric guitar appears on Nikel’s box set A DECADE under the title – “witness.”

A long time favourite album as it captures the first collaboration I had with composer Clemens Gadenstaetter and accordionist Krassimir Sterev with whom I have been working closely since many years. The piece bringing us together opens the album , baring the title “Fluchten Agorasonie” and is offering a quite unique instrumentation of six soloists – accordion, electric guitar, 2 pianos, 2 percussionist) & large orchestra.

This album captures Nikel live at the Donaueschinger Musiktage Festival, presenting the world premiere performances of Clemens Gadenstaetter’s – “Sad Songs” & Malin Bang’s – “Kubushi Burui.”. Additional works by Michael Wertmueller & Mark Barden, were also premiered at the same show but were not included on the official release. Later on these pieces were recorded in the studio for Nikel’s A DECADE box set and have become since quite essential on the ensemble’s repertoire.  Till today this Donaueschinger Musiktage show marks one of the most pivotal moments of the group’s career.

Founded in 1921, the Donaueschinger Musiktage is one of the oldest festivals for Contemporary Art Music in the world, and among the best-known and most prestigious. Each year the festival is releasing a CD compilation of that year’s best live performances offering a “stills audio image” of current streams in New Art Music. This release features my performance with ensemble Klangforum Wien of Rebecca Saunders’ new creation (“Skin”) for voice & large ensemble.

Recorded in Paris at Studio “La Muse en Circuit” this is one of the most ambitious projects I participated in. Joined by guitarist Tom Pauwels, this album features an 80 minute work (“Om On”) by composer Pierluigi Billone for two electric guitars.

An album dedicated to the works of composer Chaya Czernowin features Nikel’s first official recording, made at the Villa Siemens in Berlin. It is a recording of the first piece written for the group by an internationally acclaimed composer baring the title “Sahaf” (DRIFT in Hebrew). Since its premiere in 2008 the piece got numerous performances world wide becoming one of the most performed pieces by Czernowin and a land mark in the developing repertoire of Nikel. 

An album featuring orchestral works by composer Chaya Czernowin in which I am performing with Nikel the concertini “Blind Radiance” for ensemble & orchestra.  

Summarising 10 years of Ensemble Nikel working together, ” A DECADE” box set offers 4 cd’s with the group’s “best of” studio recordings, 1 DVD capturing a live performance and a vast book of interviews, articles and visuals. 

Founded in 1921, the Donaueschinger Musiktage is one of the oldest festivals for Contemporary Art Music in the world, and among the best-known and most prestigious. Each year the festival is releasing a CD compilation of that year’s best live performances offering a “stills audio image” of current streams in New Art Music. This release features my performance on Andreas Dohmen’s triple concerto (“a doppio movement ) for electric guitar, harp, piano & orchestra.

Joining Ensemble Phace here for Piereluigi Billone’s large scale piece (“Face”) for voice & ensemble.

In this retrospective release of composer’s Stefan Prins output, I am featured with a solo performance (“Not I”) and a large ensemble piece (“Third Space”) together with Ensemble Klangforum Wien. The physical object is also including a DVD and some other gems by Prins that made their way into the contemporary canon of Euroean Art Music.

Founded in 1921, the Donaueschinger Musiktage is one of the oldest festivals for Contemporary Art Music in the world, and among the best-known and most prestigious. Each year the festival is releasing a CD compilation of that year’s best live performances offering a “stills audio image” of current streams in New Art Music. This release features my performance with ensemble Klangforum Wien of Mirela Ivicevic’s new creation (“Case White”) for large ensemble.

A solo album capturing the “Sgorgo” triptych for electric guitar written by Italian composer Pierlugii Billone. From electric hum to fractured synth sounds – the audioscape and techniques covered in the three featured works are one of the most aspiring attempts in re-defining the codex of electric guitar in contemporary Art music.

Nikel has been working with composer Marco Momi since 2010 and this album is the capturing of this long term friendship and collaboration.  Featuring two quartets and a series of intertwined solos (NUDI) it is a proper representation of the group’s interest in the fusion of acoustic and electronic sound sources.

Featuring a verity of pivotal groups in the European art music scene this triplet release is probably the vastest publication of recorded music by Austrian composer Clemens Gadenstaetter. I am featured here with a quartet (“Sad Songs”) performed by Nikel and a duo for electric guitar & accordion (“Bodies”) with my long time colleague, accordionist Krassimir Sterev.

Release Date: September 8th, 2020 (Orders available below)

For a long time I have wanted to tackle canonic repertoire and offer my perspective on certain works. At the same time a central idea was to counterpoint such classics with recent creations to reveal something of the aesthetic, instrumental and idiomatic change that has taken place in New Art Music for electric guitar. Binding it all together is my ongoing interest in nostalgia, here taking shape in the presence of harmonies which could roughly be categorised as tonal or modal. These I find fascinating as they hold a double (almost contradicting) quality. On one hand contemporary by the recontextualization of such material while at the same time nostalgic by its offering of a familiar, cradling musical sensation from the past.

And with nostalgia, what’s better (besides the sonic quality) than enjoying the music on vinyl, resonating the above ideas both in format and listening manner with two very distinct sides. Side A addresses solo pieces with accompaniment (from 80’s prerecorded tape to current electronics) while side B is rougher, stripped in nature and more suggestive of a “live in the studio” sensation. Therefore 33 RPM points both to the medium (vinyl) and to the time (+/-33 years between the old/new pieces) over which this musical transformation took place.

Track Listing:

SIDE A
1. Steve Reich: Electric Counterpoint (I. fast) [6:52]
2. Steve Reich: Electric Counterpoint (II. slow) [3:21]
3. Steve Reich: Electric Counterpoint (III. fast) [4:27]
4. Marco Momi: Quattro Nudi [10:33]

SIDE B
5. Tristan Murail: Vampyr! [6:31]
6. Clemens Gadenstätter: Studies for a Portrait [15:25]

Credits:

Yaron Deutsch: Acoustic & Electric guitars // Stefano Bechini: Mixing & Mastering // Yoav Perry: Graphic design

• Digital download code sent via email with any vinyl order.

   

Release Date: March 4th, 2022 (Orders available below)

Nikel’s most recent release is a capturing of Klaus Lang’s 60 mini work – “Bright Darkness”. This piece we’ve been touring around with for quite some time often performing it outdoors – in parallel to sundown. During the pandemic we had the chance to get in the studio and put this work onto the tapes but this time with the obvious studio indoor benefit of having proper silence to allow the listener the chance of enjoying the verity of details and layers Lang had carved so meticulously. Here is what he had written about the work:

“Listening with clogged ears and seeing with closed eyes.”

“What we perceive is very often not what our senses are suggesting – in fact it is our notion of something, shaped by concepts. We are impeded in realizing our sensory perception by a learned mechanism of our mind. It’s not uncommon that our preconceived expectations, our prejudices, are exactly the opposite of what we sensorially experience. If we obviate all noises, it gets louder, if we close our eyes, it gets light. We might question what we really see when we close our eyes in order to ‘see nothing’, and what even is our idea of ‘seeing nothing’ and ‘darkness’? The same applies for movement, too. Sometimes we can’t tell whether an object is moving or not. Is it a chord we’re listening to, or a line? A layer or a process? Or is it just our mind moving? Where can we find the answers to these questions?”

Klaus Lang

Buy & listen here: https://nikel.bandcamp.com

Release Date: November 16th, 2022 (Click here to Buy & listen )

Credits:

Yaron Deutsch, electric guitar

Caley Monahon-Ward, recording and mix
Stefano Bechini, mastering
Photography, H. Paul Moon
Album design: NINETYTWO studio

Recorded at Mary Flagler Cary Hall, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York City on August 22, 2022. Produced for TIME:SPANS 2022 by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust.

TIME:SPANS Contemporary Music Festival:
Thomas Fichter, Executive/Artistic Director
Caley Monahon-Ward, Director of Production
Kayleigh Butcher, Program Coordinator
Carly Levin, Production Manager

Nikel’s third album is a homage to the medium of Radio and its role in the 21st century. Recorded in France, Germany & Switzerland during the years of covid pandemic the album features four works commissioned by various European radio stations only to remind us of the power public broadcast has in producing cutting edge content. As a result listeners are in for the rare chance to hear Nikel playing works that were brand new or only performed once or twice prior to their recording date. As such the album has a raw energy nourished also by the strategy of not recording more than 2-3 takes per piece. Repertoire wise Radio Works also offers a great introduction to up and coming composers Nikel has not yet worked with. Among them Didem Coşkunseven, Huihui Cheng & Sylvain Marty. Closing the album is a piece by Matthew Shlomowitz & Jennifer Walshe (also featured on vocals) which grew from a 10 minute work as documented here into a one hour extravaganza that we recently premiered at the notorious Darmstadt International Summer Courses festival.

I have been immersed with the music of Hugues Dufourt for almost two decades now and more so since 2021 as the idea of a triple album marking the composer’s 80th birthday began to take shape. My role in this was to curate and record Dufourt’s electric guitar catalogue ranging from 1986 to 2022 – a rewarding task that summoned numerous one on one hours with the composer and great sessions with some of my favorite musicians and engineers. On Jan. 26th, 2024 Bastille Musique label published the result in a 3 cd box set featuring world premiere recordings by ensemble recherche, WDR Sinfonieorchester, Ensemble Nikel, Remix Ensemble, Nicolas Hodges (piano) & myself. Produced by the WDR, the box set includes an 80-page trilingual booklet (EN, FR, DE) with articles by Martin Kaltenecker, Harry Vogt and an interview with the composer, several autograph pages as well as two concertina-fold inserts featuring photos of the composer and the performers during the recordings.

“inhabit” the second release by Stefan Prins on Sub Rosa label, brings together four recent, large-scale compositions composed by Prins after 2020. From my perspective, it features an exceptional recording of his electric guitar concerto (“Under_Current”) which got its premiere a year before at the Donaueschinger Musiktage festival. With an additional performance taking place in Luxembourg, the ground was well set for a recording session the following year at Glasgow’s City Halls. Conductor Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish symphony orchestra delivered a great performance. Andrew Trinick & Alison Rhynas from the BBC team did their magic and my long time friend and collaborator, Stefano Bechini, did the mixing and mastering of the whole album.

This release is a co-production with Deutschlandfunk Kultur and BBC Radio 3 and was made possible by the generous support of the Flemish Community (Flanders State of the Art), the Nadar Ensemble, Ensemble Mosaik, and EnsembleKollektiv Berlin, along with all the musicians involved.

Track Listing:

1. inhabit Inhibition Space #1 (2020) for bass flute, bass oboe, bass clarinet & live-electronics / Ensemble Mosaik12:19
2. inhabit_inhibit (2019-21) for four spatialized quartets, six feedback soloists & live-electronics / EnsembleKollektiv Berlin, cond. Max Murray 47:10
3. Under_current (2020-21) for electric guitar and orchestra / Yaron Deutsch & BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, cond. Ilan Volkov 39:16
4. Mesh (2022-23) for ensemble & live-electronics / Nadar Ensemble 34:07