Arnold Kasar is a pianist, sound designer, and music producer from Berlin. For his new project THE BRUCKNER TAPES, he had access to the historical recordings of Bruckner symphonies from the legendary ETERNA archive.
The recordings used for the project date from 1962 to 1990. During this period of the Cold War, the Austrian conductors Franz Konwitschny and Otmar Suitner traveled between Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin and created masterful interpretations with the leading East German orchestras.
Arnold Kasar deliberately selects spherical, poetic motifs from Bruckner’s symphonies. The source material is broken down into the smallest individual parts and reassembled into sound textures using granular synthesis. Kasar’s innovative fusion of motifs from his piano playing with this newly created tapestry of sound, derived from Bruckner’s micro-phrases, results in an artfully interwoven, meditatively circulating sound that relaxes the senses while inviting concentrated listening.
The music of Berlin-based pianist and producer Arnold Kasar moves between classical music, ambient and electronica. Stylistically wandering between these worlds, he has produced outstanding albums in these genres in recent years. The album “Einfluss” was released by Deutsche Grammophon in collaboration with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and further solo albums followed as well as concerts in the Elbphilharmonie, Volksbühne, London and Vienna.
For the performance and recording of his works, Arnold Kasar used a prepared piano on many occasions. The resulting sound material was used to develop his own synthesizer and sampling tools, with which he primarily pursues his sound art. „Since my solo debut, I have my own color pallete, so to speak,“ is how Arnold Kasar describes his stylistic means. Most recently, he had also used AI-based algorithms to explore the boundaries between classical composition and postmodern sound textures. His new solo album was released on the Berlin label Neue Meister.
