Name: Kolmar
Brand: Max de Wardener

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

LP-VGR-047

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2019-07-26

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Redeye

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

5051083147101

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Total Cap

CD-VGR-047

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5051083147118

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Max de Wardener

Genre US

Modern Composition

Label US

Village Green

Max de Wardener is a London-based, British composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He is renowned for his exceptional talent in creating captivating scores for film and television. With a diverse musical background spanning jazz, classical, world and electronic genres, Max's compositions are both versatile and innovative.

His unique style sets him apart from other artists in the industry. Max's music has an unmistakable quality that seamlessly blends various influences to create a truly immersive experience for listeners. His ability to effortlessly navigate between different musical landscapes showcases his immense skill as a composer.

Inspired by the likes of Andrew Pekler, Christina Vantzou, Yoshihiro Hanno, Mara Carlyle, Tim Hecker and many others*, Max continues to push boundaries with his boundary-breaking soundscapes. Whether it's through his intricate melodies or mesmerizing rhythms, Max consistently delivers music that captivates audiences worldwide.

For innovative composer Max de Wardener, music is a kind of time travel, a means of exploring the antique and the arcane and repurposing them for a forward-facing now. Classically trained, de Wardener is nevertheless renowned for compositions that explore everything from church organs to self-built instruments, as well as electronics and more orthodox chamber configurations. On Kolmar, his debut album for Village Green, the composer teases pure, dream-like sine wave tones from recondite, early-to-mid 20th century instruments like the ondes martenot, the Cristal Baschet and the glass harmonica. De Wardener melds these seamlessly with heavily manipulated Buchla and Oberheim analogue synthesisers, grand pipe organs pitched down several octaves (or with all the stops pushed in “so that the sound collapses”) and miscellaneous exotic but precisely applied acoustic percussion, most of it courtesy of prodigious jazz drummer Moses Boyd. Yet for all its vintage kit, this is no techno-historical grab bag or sonic museum piece. Nor is it merely an exercise in arch retro-futurism. Kolmar, over two years in the making, is often ravishingly mellifluous and emotionally stirring, while simultaneously retaining the power to disorient – provoking and unsettling the ear as readily as charming and seducing it. Kolmar was recorded at Tramways Studios in London, at synth specialists Simon Sound in Brighton and at the Alsace-Lorraine studio of rare instrument collector and sometime Radiohead and Tom Waits affiliate Thomas Bloch, whose painstaking glass instrument multi-tracking was crucial in realising what de Wardener had envisioned for these delicate devices (he is “a craftsman of the monophonic”, the composer submits). The album is in fact named after the small town in the Franco-German borderlands, Colmar, close to Bloch’s studio. Propelled and defined by such playful means of disrupting default creative gesture, Kolmar is the work of a musical adventurer eager to map terra incognita, albeit using some resonant contours of the past. Crucially, de Wardener’s delight in pure tone and ingenuous joy in the sculptural possibility of sound are as palpable as they are persuasive. Time travel has rarely sounded so compelling.

Kolmar

Music US