Monuments

Monuments offers the exciting collaboration of the trio Dell Lillinger Westergard (DLW) and Mat Maneri. In 2015 the internationally acclaimed trio teamed up with the American viola virtuoso to investigate in a fascinating sound landscape. Maneri’s unique style is informed by microtonal concepts and open compositions. It blends perfectly well with the innovative structural approach of DLW, while expanding the latter in its harmonic tonal space. Displaying ground-breaking views on and work with musical material, the recording at hand focuses on the commonality and the aspect of balance, especially between the different and contrasting instrument groupings and timbres.

This publication is the second publication in the new retroactive series of the exclusive artist’s label edition niehler werft (enw). The retroactive series releases recordings from my archives as a critical comment and homage to the present discourse in music. It is through the retroactive series that I am revisiting and recontextualizing hitherto unpublished material recorded earlier in my career in order to draw new conclusions on the development of contemporary experimental music and my own positioning towards it. With the attempt to contribute to a rewriting of contemporary experimental music’s canon, the retroactive series provides insight into the role and significance of collaborations I have undertaken, of procedures and strategies that have been crucial to the development of my work, and of the conceptual apparatus I have employed. This series paints a picture of the range of my different musical activities and sheds light on the role it plays in the world of contemporary experimental music. The retroactives series sheds light on historical markstones of my ongoing effort to rethink the identity of contemporary composing music and to rewrite its canon. Perspetivizing questions not only of notation, interpretation, composition and improvisation my work focusses on reconceptualizing the notions of materialility and the plasticity of the rhythmic embodiment as well as the tension between the physical presence of the playing in relation to compositional structures.